Days of the Dead (26 page)

In his dreams that afternoon, as he lay with Rose in the drowsy siesta dimness, January decorated his own family altar with flowers in his heart. On it he put his first wife’s single gold earring that had belonged to her mother in the deserts of northern Africa, probably only a few hundred miles north of where his own father had been born. He arranged her thimbles and her needles, and the feather aigrettes she’d put in her hats, and on a plate put honey for the sweetness of her kisses, and fire—in his dream he saw it dancing in a little dish—for the love that had been between them, fire that had never gone out. Of his father he had nothing, yet in his dream the altar was crowded with the magic light of the songs he’d sung, and the gift of music that he’d passed on to January as a tiny child. The pressure of a big, reassuring hand on January’s shoulder, telling the child he had been in those days of slavery and fear that everything would eventually be all right.

The memory of being loved.

From that beautiful altar he turned to the three-hundred-year-old altar of the de Castellóns, and he saw it strewn with trash and sprinkled with blood.

Half a piece of dry bread on a French china plate.

Natividad’s bridal veil, and a green-and-white Meissen tea-cup with a rabbit’s heart in it, floating in blood.

A tortilla-press with blood and hair on its edge.

And above all, the staring skeletal image of the God of the Dead.

SEVENTEEN

A bell clanged softly, the only sound within the dim-lit church. January crossed himself, and around him whispers swelled to a murmur like the rustle of wind through leaves. “It’s absolutely barbaric,” murmured a voice in his ear, and Don Anastasio slipped into the row beside him, far over to the side of the aisle but close to the immense grating of turned wood that divided the Church of the Bleeding Heart of Mary from floor to ceiling, like the bars of an American prison cell. “I’m surprised to see you here, Enero. You impressed me as a man of greater education than most of my relatives.”

“I have learned never to have opinions about anyone’s relatives,” replied January in an undertone. “But I try to continue my own education wherever I find myself.”

“An education indeed.” The Don’s thin mouth bent sourly under his neat black beard. “Where else can one look directly through a window into the fifteenth century?” He folded his hands as he spoke, though January observed that unlike most of the crowd who packed the church from the wooden grating to the outer doors, he carried neither rosary nor prayer-book. His black trousers and his close-fitting jacket of black linen were unrelieved by any touch of color—mourning for his brother-in-law Don Fernando?

Or for the young girl about to leave the world?

From the painted vaults of the ceiling hung a black curtain, a good thirty feet down to the floor. The floor itself was wrought of blocks of onyx, worn by the bare feet of penitents through the centuries. Despite a bound and bleeding St. Sebastian, a primitive-looking Virgin in a pink gown entirely covered with some of the largest pearls January had ever seen, and Stations of the Cross whose graphic gruesomeness would have made Goya queasy, the grating and the curtain gave the small church the air of a theater, as indeed, January supposed, it was. Those who knelt shoulder-to-shoulder with him, packing the cramped sanctuary to the doors, jostled and conversed much more like the audience at the opera than the witnesses of a solemn ceremony.

Don Anastasio went on. “As if this country has not better things to do with its young women—girls of intelligence and breeding like Pilar, girls whose family could afford to give them decent educations—than to convince them from the time they’re able to walk that God wants them immured in prison to waste the rest of their lives in self-torture and grief. At least in India they give women the chance to bear and educate children before they burn them to death.”

January said nothing. Having come early, he had secured a place not far from the grating that separated the public portion of the convent church from that reserved for the nuns. He wondered how Rose was faring, and whether Sor Perdita would cut short their conversation to participate in this ceremony. A few rows ahead of him he could see the de Bujerio family, lacking only Doña Imelda: among that swarm of unmarried and presumably dowerless female cousins, second-cousins, sisters, aunts, and great-aunts he recognized Doña Isabella, decked out in what Rose irreverently referred to as “Mexican mourning,” a black gown of extremely opulent fabric and cut worn with a parure of diamonds. Beside her knelt Doña Josefa, veiled and unadorned, her emaciated hands folded. There was no sign of the girl Paloma, or of Casimiro. Did Don Prospero ever permit them to leave Mictlán?

A muted stirring just this side of the grille drew January’s attention. A dozen musicians filed in—guitars, cornets, violins, a bass-fiddle, and two clarionettes, like the orchestra for a dance. The organ in the rear of the church groaned out a sonorous note, and from the small square outside, January heard the crackle of rockets being set off into the afternoon sky. At the same moment the band burst into lively music—the Overture from
The Barber of Seville,
which made January wonder if the person who’d chosen it had ever seen the thoroughly irreverent opera. From the narrow door that had admitted the musicians, Doña Imelda emerged, gorgeously gowned in sea-green and gold and literally flashing with jewels. She took her place among her relatives and the music ceased, and with a faint squeaking of pulleys, the black curtain behind the grating lifted, for all the world, thought January, like the opening act of an opera. . . .

In spite of himself, he thought,
Yes, and the opera is Act Two of
Robert le Diable,
with the chorus of mad dancing nuns. . . .

Don Anastasio was right. Whatever one felt about the Church, there was something in the scene beyond the grating that struck him as slightly hysterical and infinitely tragic.

Candles blazed around the altar, the gold that plated every pillar, swag, and curlicue throwing back the soft waxlight in a thick, dusky glory that is unlike anything else in the world. Banners, drapings, tassels of crimson, burned like blood; painted statues of saints gestured, bled, and blessed. At a table to one side, the Bishop of Mexico City sat, gold and scarlet himself, stout and benevolent, flanked by attendant priests. And on the floor before the altar, stretched prostrate in robes of funereal black, lay the nuns of the Convent of the Bleeding Heart of Mary, faces pressed to the floor, hands stretched above their heads grasping thick candles of white beeswax whose faintly honeyed smell rose above the musky pungence of incense.

The nuns softly chanted,
“Veni, sponsa Christi, accipe coronam, quam tibi Dominus praeparavit in aeternum . . .”
to the girl who knelt among them, delicate and beautiful in her party-dress of pale-blue silk and lace, veiled beneath her crown of diamonds, her shield of gold and paint held like a bridal bouquet in her hands.

January glanced sidelong in time to see Doña Josefa throw back her own veil, and the expression on her face was almost shocking to see. Hungry, furious, eyes blazing with envy and rage as she silently mouthed the words of what might have been prayer.

“Adducentur regi virgines post eam. . . .”
The nuns rose, singing, then knelt again and touched their faces to the floor, their voices sweet and eerie in the painted vaults of the church.
“Proximae ejus afferentur tibi in laetitia. . . .”

A priest came forward and raised Pilar, and led her to the bishop. The curtain came down and the band played again, Mozart this time, gay German dances, and again the chatter rose, exactly like that during the opera’s entr’acte. Don Anastasio looked as if he’d bitten into sour fruit, but he remained. It was true what Consuela had often said, that family was everything: one did one’s duty no matter what one felt. When the curtain went up again, January thought,
Act Two—the wicked Elena is turning me into a heretic like herself. . . .
But his smile faded at the sight of the girl Pilar lying prostrate on the floor before the altar, dressed in black and covered with black sack-cloth: jewels gone, lace gone, crown gone, as if she were truly dead. The nuns knelt around her, singing:
“Me expectaverunt peccatores, ut perderent me: testimonia tua, Domine, intellexi . . .”

The girl was raised, still fighting to keep a good face on the matter, but in her eyes January saw that she was beginning to realize just what her life would be, forever, until she died. She knelt to the bishop and kissed his ring, then moved from one dark-clad phantom to the next, embraced by each like a sister, as if with each embrace she was being drawn further into the world of the shades. The fatter of the two attendant priests elbowed his way through the nuns to the grating and delivered a sermon about how Pilar had “chosen the good part, which could not be taken away from them.”

“Ass,” whispered Don Anastasio savagely. Doña Imelda clasped her hands before her breast and cast her gaze ceilingward in an expression of joyous martyrdom, not even looking at her daughter. Doña Josefa’s face was like iron, cheated bitterness in her eyes.

The girl came forward to the curtain, looking out into the church. The last people she would ever see who were not nuns, thought January.

Tears were running down her face.

The black curtain came down.

“Honestly!” Doña Josefa nearly spat the word as her sister and Don Rafael helped her to her feet. “That girl’s ingratitude sickens me, Imelda! What I would do—what I
have
done already—to stand where she now stands. . . .”

The men were lighting their cigars the moment they got into the sacristy, where trestle tables were spread with
pandolce
and punch. “What’s this I hear,” January said as he and Anastasio edged through the press, “about Don Prospero leaving money to the Convent of the Bleeding Heart in his will?”

“What?”
Anastasio stared, cigar forgotten in his hand. “What will? Where did you hear that?”

“From Ylario. He asked the other day if I knew anything about it.”

“Where did he hear it? It’s absurd.” But the
hacendado
looked deeply shocked, and glanced around them at the crowd that pressed toward the refreshments. Liveried servants dippered flavored pulque into cups.

“
Ylario
told you? Surely it wasn’t in the papers on the study desk? I looked, to make certain there was nothing there that harridan La Lorcha could use. . . .”

“He wouldn’t say where he’d heard it. It didn’t sound as if he’d seen it for himself.”

“Good Lord, I should hope not!” Don Anastasio stepped to the nearest candle to light his cigar. “If it exists, it’ll play hell with the will he wrote a year ago, after Damiano died. Though, of course, now that Fernando is dead . . . But leave money to the convent? That’s insane. . . .” Then he seemed to hear his own words, and laughed ruefully. “So in fact it may be true after all. But if that’s the case, why . . . ?”

“’Stasio,
mi corazón.
” Doña Isabella appeared, fanning herself with what looked like a half-acre of stiffened black lace and extending a fragile mitted hand. “You simply
must
find me a chair in all this! I’m quite faint, and feel absolutely unable to breathe. Your sister has been
prosing
on about how
dreadful
her lot in life is until I promise you I see spots before my eyes!”

“
Mi corazón,
if you’re seeing spots before your eyes, it’s from the candy you’ve doubtless been eating. . . .”

January slipped away from the sacristy with a sense of relief. He circled the convent church, observing as he did so the stones low down in the walls where the broken stucco showed carvings of Tlaloc with his huge ringed eyes and protruding tusks. The old Indian woman who minded the convent gate went inside at January’s knock—through the iron-barred judas in the gate January could see a patio beyond, riotous with late roses, and the heavy doors of the convent itself.

A few moments later Rose appeared, dusting powdered sugar off her fingers. She handed a coin to the Indian woman—a servant, not a nun to judge by her dress, and the woman slipped it into her bosom—and stepped through the outer gate, which closed behind her with a clang. The church’s bells were ringing as January walked her back along the narrow lane to the square. Fireworks cracked, showering glittering blossoms through the twilight sky.

“Did you ask Don Anastasio about the will?” she inquired as Juan brought the carriage up.

January nodded. “He’d never heard of it. There’s evidently a will already in existence, written after Damiano died. Goodness knows what its terms are, but Anastasio made no comment about its sanity or insanity, so it must be fairly normal. I could think of no polite way to ask him further questions, but I will.” He gazed worriedly up at the darkening sky, stitched with the brilliant red and white of fireworks.

“I talked to Sancho—he knows of no robbers here in town who are black. So Werther must have seen either Butler’s men or El Moro, though God knows what El Moro would be doing playing sneak-thief in an alley. As I recall, Santa Anna asked Don Prospero to be at the reception tonight, and if he is there, we have to somehow convince Santa Anna to issue an order
in writing
officially remanding Hannibal to Don Prospero’s custody. It’s the only way I can think of to buy us more time.”

“It may be,” said Rose worriedly, “if it works. But aside from the issue of whether Ylario will respect such an order, it will infinitely complicate any effort of ours to get him away. Was Josefa at the church?”

“In the front row. With an expression on her face of the most devouring fury that Pilar was where she, Josefa, longed to be.”

“Mmmn.” Rose did not look surprised. “Sor Perdita spoke of the hatred in Josefa’s letters, envy so deep that she expressed not even gladness for the girl’s sake. She wrote to Sor Perdita nearly every day, you know—including a most condescending description of my morning in the chapel with her:
I feel that worldly and frivolous as she is, my example helped show this woman some glimmering of God’s light. . . .
”

“
Worldly and frivolous?
Are you sure she spoke of you and not your evil twin sister, Elena?”

“One wonders indeed.” Rose’s eyebrows drew together as the carriage jolted over the rutted pavement of the Calle Tacuba. “I don’t understand religious people very well,” she said after a time. “And I’ve never comprehended the concept that God wants some people to tell other people how they ought to live. Having read history, I know very well that some people are quite willing to kill others over what they think God has told them is their right: to appoint priests and bishops, for instance, or whether to hang a cross or a crescent in certain old buildings in Palestine, or whether they should pray in Latin or German. But what Josefa herself would actually
do . . .
I don’t know.”