Days of the Dead (33 page)

“. . . all they’ll see is a couple of perfectly innocent charros taking a herd of cattle back to Don Anastasio’s land.” Rose nipped in front of another steer, the horse clearly knowing the work. “From there we can . . . what? Circle back to town and present our side of the problem to Sir Henry? I feel certain he’s heard more eccentric things from Don Prospero than the mere murder of a cook. Get in touch with Don Anastasio himself? He’ll be in the cemetery tonight—and we have to be there in any case to intercept Valentina.”

“If—for whatever reason—Don Anastasio did kill Fernando,” said January slowly, “I think it would be singularly dangerous to let him know we’re not halfway to Vera Cruz and still running.” He tried to imitate what he thought Rose was doing, veering back and forth across the heels of the herd, urging them in the direction of the distant village. He hoped that none of those few vaqueros who might have the courage to climb the Pyramid of Mictlantecuhtli on the Day of the Dead would be bright enough to wonder about the obvious ineptitude of one of those “innocent charros” he saw from the top. “Whoever murdered the cook did so because he—or she—saw that I was getting close to the answer. If I can’t be driven off, I will need to be killed. . . . And now that you’ve joined me, you’ll be presumed to know whatever it is I might have learned.”

“I wonder if that’s what the priest had in mind when he asked if I would take you for better or for worse. Hey up, Bossie, no you
don’t
!” She swung her hat at a cow, who shook enormous horns at her but trotted back to the herd. “On the other hand, it’s very likely Don Anastasio will remain at Mictlán for part of the day—to supervise the search for you, if he is the murderer, or to deal with Don Prospero at the very least. We might well learn something from a simple investigation of the hacienda de Saragosse if we’re not too long about it. After that I suppose we can make it to Mexico City before mid-day tomorrow, and take refuge with Sir Henry.”

“We could,” agreed January, squinting at the angle of the sun. “But unless I’m much mistaken, tomorrow night is when Don Prospero is going to visit his private
offrenda
within the Pyramid of the Dead to ask his son about what he should do with his murderer. And whatever he thinks Fernando will tell him to do with Hannibal, I’d rather be on hand.”

TWENTY-TWO

They concealed the horses in the ruined curing-shed at Saragosse, which stood across the village stream and about a half-mile from the small
casco
’s red-washed walls. The shed itself had apparently been torched several years previously, by bandits or by soldiers in the endless struggles for military supremacy that had blotched Mexico’s history since its independence from Spain; when January made a cautious foray into the weed-grown fields that surrounded it, he saw the remains of a fire beneath the ragged growth of soapweed and creosote as well.

“So much for Don Anastasio’s efforts to bring peanuts into fashion among the upper classes,” he murmured, returning to the striped shade where Rose was looking around for a vessel to carry water to the horses. From the debris along the walls he picked out a snarl of hair-stemmed vine, studded still with the dried remains of hulls. Broken tables down the center of the shed must have been for stripping and sorting the pods from the dried vines; the remains of two ovens and a woodshed outside showed where they’d been roasted. “Can you picture Doña Imelda settling down with a bowl of peanuts and a glass of pulque? Neither can I.”

The village was quiet save for the voices of some of the women washing clothes on the flat rocks of the stream beyond the trees. After resting the horses and letting them forage among the tall grasses, Rose and January re-saddled and rode in a long circuit around the outside of the village to the churchyard that lay just outside the
casco
walls. A few men were still tinkering with the bamboo framework for the fireworks up near the church door, and others were just setting up tables for refreshments. Most of the graves had been decorated with flowers, and some with the little statues that mocked death: skeleton priests and nuns, ladies and gentlemen, and here and there with the loved toys of children whose parents had not forgotten them. As they passed the village, January saw thick trails of marigold petals running through the dust of the street, and into the doorways and courtyards.

But it was early yet in the afternoon. Only a few children darted among the graves, and they ran away crying, “El Moro!” at the sight of January’s black face.

The tallest tomb in the center of the churchyard had been decorated lavishly with banners of fancifully-cut paper and rich profusions of flowers. Many of its marble slabs had been effaced by time: the earliest date January could read was 1577. Rinaldo de Avila de Saragosse y Merced, born in Barcelona in 1532. The remains of his wife were there as well.

The newest slab bore four names: Maria-Ursulina 1821–1830; Cicero 1823–1826; Maria-Proserpina 1826–1834; Porferio 1830–1833. Above them a smaller slab bore the name Orlando Iglesio, 1805–1818.

“Maria-Exaltación’s child?” asked Rose, and January said, “It has to be. It makes sense if Don Anastasio is a friend of the family. . . .”

“How DARE you come into this place?” gasped a voice behind them, and turning, startled, January found himself face-to-face with a young man in a priest’s black robe: thin, bespectacled, his well-born European features rigid with outrage. “I don’t care who your patron is, I told you never to return—”

He broke off, blinked, stepped closer, and removed his spectacles to squint. January saw they were very thick and very old, the gold rims having been mended many times.

“I’m so sorry.” The priest rubbed his eyes and replaced the framework of metal and glass on his beaky nose. “I took you for . . . I thought you were someone else.”

“You thought I was my cousin, in fact,” said January quietly, and assumed an expression of profoundest sorrow and shame.

The priest nodded, and there was no question, to judge by the pinched righteous anger of his expression, that it was El Moro he had thought to see.

“And that said,” continued January in his best and most educated Spanish, “I beg you, Father, speak to no one of my presence here. My cousin would not appreciate hearing I was near-by.”

“No,” said the priest, “of course not. But I warn you, the Padrón who owns this land will return this evening, and he has employed your cousin—paid him off—to do jobs for him in the past. The Padrón may tell him of your presence.”

“Oho.” January raised his brows. “He rides high with the gentry now, does he?”

Spite and anger narrowed the young man’s pale eyes. “Don Anastasio is an atheist and a heretic,” he said, his voice soft but nearly spitting the words. “An unbeliever who tries to corrupt all the souls under my care with his books and his ‘science’ and his ‘logic.’ And they follow him, because he has learned medicine and can cure their ills, as he cured your cousin’s and your cousin’s followers. A
brujo—
a sorcerer—who has sold his soul to Satan.”

Rose touched the grave-slab of the dead children and said gently, “From the dates on these slabs it seems to me that he has paid at least some of his debt.”

“Rather, his poor wife has paid.” The young priest sighed. “A lady of great kindness to all. It is only through her generosity and gifts that this village has been able to maintain a church living at all. Matla, the
mayordomo
here, tells me that Don Anastasio believed that he could save his children by watching and writing down every morsel of food that they ate, by withholding food from them—now meat, now fish, now fruit—as if he, and not All-Merciful God, holds the lives of
los niños
in his hands.”

Rose said in precisely the voice she had used to exclaim over Señora Lorcha’s accusations of Don Prospero’s cook, “What an
extraordinary
delusion!”

The priest assumed an expression of somewhat peevish self-righteousness, like Hamlet’s friends reveling in their secret knowledge:
We could, and if we would . . .

“They tell me in the village that Don Anastasio has been thus—like a form of madness—for many years, since the death of a young gentleman who was raised in his household,” said the priest. “Blas—the old scoundrel who ran the
pulqueria
in the village—had his establishment closed down because the young gentleman died there: choked, and turned blue, and perished in convulsions, as if invisible hands were closed around his throat. I am told—I have served here in Saragosse only this year and last—that the Don blamed his poor wife when their own children died, cursing her and saying she had poisoned them. But what harm is there in giving sugared peanuts to a child?”

January’s glance crossed Rose’s, and he said, “What harm indeed?”

“Do you think it was Don Anastasio who paid El Moro to attack Werther in town?”

“Someone did.” January stripped the saddle off the black gelding in the curing-shed’s slanting shade, rubbed the animal’s back with a bunched handful of weed-stems. It was the time of siesta—the washer-women had abandoned the stream, and the gentle noises of the village street, dimly audible even at a mile distant beyond the screens of cactus and trees, had lulled. “The only other person who might have utilized the bandit’s services would be Don Prospero himself—and Don Prospero wouldn’t care if Werther knew the contents of his will. I only hope Ylario is able to protect the boy in prison, and that von Winterfeldt can get him out of the country. He’s had a narrow escape.”

“And Hannibal’s going to have a narrower one.” Rose settled on the edge of one of the great stone oil-presses that filled all of one end of the shed. The incandescent afternoon sunlight picked brassy splinters in her loosened hair and fragments of fire in her spectacles. “If we can get him out of there at all. He’ll be at the churchyard at Mictlán tonight, playing for the ghosts of
los niños. . . .
”

“And Don Prospero will be watching him like a hawk,” January reminded her. “Tonight is our only chance to hear whatever Valentina has to tell—I think we need to take it. I have an idea of how to convince Don Prospero of Hannibal’s innocence.”

“If you can explain to Don Prospero not only that morbid sensitivities exist, but that his son was poisoned with a handful of peanuts,” said Rose, “I take my hat off to you, sir. I can’t imagine even how I’d try.”

January smiled. “That’s because you don’t have a
voodooienne
for a sister,” he said. “It’s all in how one puts things; and I think I know how to make Don Prospero hear.”

The sun sank, and coolness seemed to rise from the earth like the breath of a sleeper, to bless the parched world. When January went out to water the horses again, he could see lights in the village, gold and amber jewels on the dove-colored velvet evening, and heard music from the churchyard, sweet and gay. He saddled the horses and he and Rose rode around to the churchyard, tying them out of sight among the willows by its wall. The gate of the cemetery glowed from the bonfires within, like a cheerful Hell-mouth, and the warm bright torchflame dyed the cinnabar tilework of the church-tower until it stood out like a column of fiery flowers against the darkening sky.

Lilies, marigolds, poppies, and coxcomb garlanded the tall gateposts, made ropes and swags around the necks of the statues on the little church’s façade. January was amused to note that the Archangels Michael and Gabriel wore feathers in their hair, the mark of an Indian warrior, and held, not swords, but the obsidian-edged clubs of Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli:
In righteousness he judges and makes war.

Under the gaze of those Aztec angels, the churchyard was a fairyland of blossom. Every tomb was now lush with the offerings of the living: baskets of tamales, brilliantly glazed pottery bowls of chicken and mole, little plates of cigars, bottles of pulque and wine. Golden oranges glowed in heaps,
pan de muerto
sparkled. Skulls wrought of sugar grinned cheerfully on all sides.

And among them the laces, the gloves, the tortoiseshell combs, and simple tools of those who had gone on to other worlds. In a green pottery dish, a necklace of amber beads:
whose?
A wooden model of a boat, with ADRIAN on its prow. A little owl wrought of lead. Music wove the gold-laced darkness. Men greeted one another with embraces, women with kisses. Children dashed about in sticky-handed excitement, brandishing pralines and stripped stalks of sugar-cane.

Candles flowed into the churchyard like a river, villagers bearing baskets of food and flowers, calling out to their friends. Indians and mestizos, villagers and the rancheros from the surrounding settlements, vaqueros and the rough muleteers who returned to their home villages on this night, to be with their families, living and dead. The women laughed together, dressed in their best: two-colored skirts stiffened out in approximation of wide petticoats, short-sleeved chemises, satin vests and sashes jingling with ornaments. The warm night gave back the scent of copal, from where, just out of the disapproving young priest’s sight, a leathery old man in a peasant’s white clothing was smoke-blessing men and women; the priest stayed by the doors of his church, greeting all who came to him.

Someone—probably the
mayordomo
and other
acomodados—
had laid offerings on the big family tomb, but it was clear by their sparseness that Don Anastasio had not yet arrived. Among the candy skulls and baskets of mangos was a bowl of sugared peanuts; January knelt and turned the pale, smooth legumes with his huge fingers, smelling the irresistible sweet-saltiness of honey and pepper and wondering if Anastasio would order them taken away.

From childhood he’d loved them—ground-nuts, they were called on Bellefleur Plantation, or monkey-nuts. When his mother had gotten a white protector and moved to New Orleans as a free woman, she wouldn’t have them in the house. He’d had to sneak out and buy them from the old man on the corner.

“It has to have been peanuts, doesn’t it?” asked Rose.

“I think so. Doña Maria-Exaltación died of eating ‘poisoned candy’—it could easily have been a praline. And in a
pulqueria,
it’s what young Orlando would have eaten the first time he slipped away at the age of fourteen to drink with the men and prove himself a man. Anastasio’s one of the few people who could come and go from Guillenormand’s kitchen without comment—it would be easy for him to carry a handful of powdered nuts wrapped in paper and dump them into the strongest-tasting dish he could find. If they didn’t kill Fernando outright, they would certainly incapacitate him to the point that, if necessary, Don Anastasio could go into the study and hold a pillow over his face until the job was done.”

Rose, usually so calmly logical, grimaced. “But . . . why?”

January shook his head and stood up again. “It doesn’t matter why,” he said. “Maybe he did want to elope with Natividad Lorcha. Or he’d conceived a chivalrous passion for Natividad and couldn’t bear the thought of Fernando laying a hand on her. Myself, I think there was something in that will that touched Don Anastasio, something we don’t know about—and probably never will know about, since Anastasio was one of the first people into the study after Fernando’s death.”

“You’re probably right,” she agreed. Somewhere a child shrieked joyfully, and the band struck up a wistful barcarole. “Still . . . How on earth are we going to prove it?”