Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (38 page)

Just as the surgeon, when called upon by the magistrate, will conscientiously slit open a comatose vampire's chest to discover how fresh and
lively its blood may be, so Father Hauser now called upon himself to examine the inspector's heart, or as I should say his soul; for he had heard from Trollhand about that ambiguous visit to the church; who had it been exactly? And why was that stinking black cape lying on top of the inspector's grave? The other vampires wondered much the same, but as usual there was nothing to prove the inspector's guilt to either party; the golden pentacle blazed on within Jette's skeleton; Kobold paid a visit to the inspector, who lay in his rotten box with his arms folded and declined to answer. Meanwhile, day came, as it always has so far, and so the priest and Trollhand set out for the cemetery, that thriving heart of the town, where Doroteja used to sing and dig in hopes of undoing her miscarriage, where Michael Liebesmann happily recovered his wife Milena, where our inspector had gone in order to advance his career, and witches and warlocks came to harvest the materials of their commerce. Come to think of it, the cemetery was the only important place in H——.

This occasion, of course, did not at all resemble the occasion when the whole village turned out for the opening of Milena's grave. Trollhand doffed his official cloak. Not even the surgeon and the drummer boy were invited. The people were in the fields. Father Hauser believed as much as ever in the inspector's loyalty, although Trollhand, having seen so much evil in his life, said: Forgive me, Father, but what lasts forever? Even undeath is turning out to be temporary, thanks to these new police methods of ours.

You're quite proud of the inspector, aren't you, Hans?

Well, said Trollhand, he's put food on my table. For every one I stake, the mayor gives me a silver thaler, although last year one of them was counterfeit.

Blackbirds and starlings rose up over their heads when they dug him up, and as he appeared distinctly
evil,
they finally put a stake through his heart, in order to teach him that the tunnel to heaven is far narrower than a corseted woman's waist. The priest, who was so well regarded that on cloudy days one could practically see his halo, held it to be for the best. Although Richter von Lochner had uttered no promise on the subject, in his Christian mercy he did presently command that the inspector's remains should rest beneath a cross made of wild rose thorns. Perhaps you consider this an inadequate reward. But as is said about
devils in the ancient
Grimorium Verum,
this sort of creature does not give anything for nothing.

Father Hauser offered up three prayers, for the inspector had certainly abated the nuisance, even if not permanently; and so tranquillity welled up out of the grave-riddled earth of Bohemia, seeping and creeping across the entire carcass of the Holy Roman Empire, until by 1855 Bavaria found it practical to recommend the amalgamation of commercial codes throughout the German states.

So long as there is an Emperor, there is still an Empire, even if he has no more than six feet of earth belonging to him, for the Empire is nothing without the Emperor.

Charlotte (Empress Carlota)

If you appreciate the way that the double-headed Austrian eagle manages to bear both sword and orb in its claws, then you may well be an adorer of the fleet, like Massimiliano, whose bedroom resembled a ship's cabin. How he loved to sail around Istria! Archduke and Admiral, lepidopterist and orange-gardener, he might have lived contented, had not his wife persuaded him otherwise. Indeed, he used to say that all he wanted out of life was a castle and garden by the sea. Instead, he entered a story told on tin-coated iron. (He was not unlike the Holy Child of Atocha, who was carried to Mexico by the Dominicans.) Once more he gazed back into the pale blue harbor, with Trieste glowing white on the underside of that blue peninsula. Then the
Novara
carried him away. He became Maximilian. Charlotte stood beside him on the foredeck, excited to finally become Carlota. To this day some Italians remain proud of him, at least to an extent. In Trieste his verdigrised statue stands high upon a cylindrical and octagonal bronze plinth studded with high-breasted angels, and there is even a bare-chested youth whom I first took for an Egyptian in a quasi-Pharaonic headdress, although now I wonder whether he could be one of the Emperor's grateful Mexican subjects?

A soldier from the Confederate States of America once observed:
Owing to some radical defect in the Mexican character unfitting them for self government the country has been cursed by one of republican form . . .

Fortunately, Maximilian now prepared to govern for them. He made it understood that his measures would have an entirely friendly character.

We remember him for many good qualities, not least his china blue eyes and beautiful teeth.

Matters ran on pretty well for the first two years,
wrote an Englishman in his service.
French bayonets kept the country quiet, and the roads open.
But presently certain Mexicans began to fall short of their Emperor's hopes. I cannot tell you whether the blue and red of Maximilian's army were inappropriate colors for those latitudes, or whether his desire to lead the natives out of anarchy exceeded their benighted comprehension. He assured them:
No Mexican has such warm feelings for his country and its progress as I.
I wish you could have seen him with his blank white forehead and his nautical side-whiskers and his squinting eyes, whose gaze was outglittered by the watch-chain peeping out of his dark vest. Beside him, Carlota in her white wedding-cake dress smiled nervously upon the world. He determined to keep only Mexicans in his government, wore white, abolished inherited debt, enacted ten-year serfdom for negroes, but only under certain conditions and with the best intentions; imported pianos, upheld the nationalization of Church property, established a minimum wage and collected butterflies. Soon the Empress was writing to France:
We see nothing to respect in this country, and shall act in such a way as to change it.
He restored the Palacio Nacional. His soldiers dug ever more convoluted earthworks isolated by ditches; established outlying piquets whose sentries lay ready to fire upon silence; rigged up abatis of prickly pears; marched out battalions of jet-black Turcos in Zouave dress; levied any number of ablebodied natives to serve in his Guardia Rural, while Carlota, twenty-five years old, clasped her lovely long-fingered hands, assuring her acquaintances in Belgium:
If necessary, I can lead an army. Do not laugh at me.
Meanwhile her husband, who was already going bald, signed the October Decree, which saved the inconvenience of trying guerrillas before executing them. But no matter how valiantly he led, anarchy marched along at his heels. Indeed, so singular is Mexican gratitude that he was practically alone even before the French troops sailed home; then he found himself defeated, surrounded, betrayed at Querétaro, and imprisoned in that half-devoured city, brought to trial at the Iturbide Theater (in absentia, since they had courteously granted him a certificate of illness) and duly
condemned to be shot on the nineteenth of June, 1867, along with his generals Mejía and Miramón.

As might have been expected, at dusk on the eighteenth he saw small hope of sleeping. This displeased him, for he wished to meet his executioners with that calm and decisive courtesy which demands a certain cast of face; it should not be said of the Emperor of Mexico that he appeared hollow-eyed at the end. In fact he had been unhealthy for years, but the valets who shaved and dressed this man had preserved him from his mirror-image. Like many of us, he believed himself somewhat younger than he was. His narrow pink face, whose eyelids were a trifle sleepy and whose chin hung too close beneath the mouth, had been widened by blond side-whiskers, and the matching beard extended his chin to normal length. Thus Maximilian at thirty; and if in truth he was closer to thirty-five, he remained as facile as ever on a horse, and nearly as attractive to women. He retained the confidence of a fresh and handsome man. It was this that he aspired to keep until the end. Insomnia could never undermine his dignity, but two or three hours of repose would increase the luster with which he smiled upon the executioners.

If the word “noblehearted” brings a smile to any reader nowadays, so much the better, for Maximilian possessed precisely this old-fashioned quality, which was precious in its time, no matter that disuse has rendered it ludicrous. Turning over his feelings, he found, as he would have expected, no anger toward the seven soldiers who would shoot him, and he thanked God for that. Tomorrow he would forgive them, ask forgiveness in return and bestow a gold ounce on each man. As for the two who must die at his side, he compassionated them more than himself. That afternoon he had penned a telegram to his triumphant enemy Juárez, requesting that they be spared; let their punishment be upon him alone. No answer came. Well, so it must be. He was never to know that the kind and loyal Mejía could have saved himself, but chose his Emperor over his own desperate wife, who next morning would pursue the carriage, screaming and raising up her baby, until the soldiers thrust her down with their bayonets. Another thing he never learned, thanks to his
abstention from the trial, was that two years ago Miramón had proposed to come over to Juárez. At any rate, on that eighteenth of June all three were good friends.— Although she had tearfully entreated his life at the knees of Juárez, who in his usual colorless way replied that he could do nothing for her, Miramón's wife was more composed than Mejía's; indeed, her resolution had brought the Emperor to tears a day or two before. Miramón must have been moved in his own way, for, kissing her hand, he remarked:
I am here because I would not listen to this woman's advice, to which Maximilian bitterly replied: Feel no remorse; I am here because I did listen to my wife.

Yes, he sorrowed for them, but they would pull through; and of course he believed so deeply in that other antique thing called “renown” that the prospect of monuments comprised the supreme consolation; it would hardly have occurred to the Emperor that they might feel differently.

He had prepared his will, although one of the witnesses' signatures was lacking. Doctor Basch was to convey his rosary and wedding ring to the adoring mother who had advised him to stick it out in Mexico, and his gold medal from the Empress Eugénie to the old Empress of Brazil, the mother of his truest love. His corpse would be embalmed, so that his mother could see it.

For his mother he felt extremely sorry. Of course she would manage to rule herself. As for Carlota (whom he still called Charlotte), he would have dreaded the prospect of somebody's bringing sad news within the ken of her wide yet small eyes, for ever since Napoleon and the Pope had declined her personal entreaties to maintain the Empire, insanity infested her peculiarly flat-topped head, and her long white hands sometimes tore at the air. Fortunately, Maximilian imagined her to be at peace; for Mejía comforted him with the fable that she had died at Miramar.

Sitting on the camp bed, he stared wearily at the ivory crucifix, which offered so little and so much, until his eyes closed for an instant. In the adjacent cell, Miramón was coughing, while the moon rose, and Austrian warships waited uselessly at Veracruz. It was half-past eight-o'-clock.

He had thought himself to be past bitterness, but presently, like mosquitoes singing round his head, bad memories rose up: the trial's thirteen
indictments, each an insult; the horribly gentle eyes of Fray Soria, who had accompanied the lawyers when they brought the verdict to his cell, while in the corridor the eavesdropping general and three colonels held their gloating breaths; and then Curtopassi, having weighed fidelity against expediency, coolly scissoring away his signature from that compromising bill of change through which the three of them had hoped to purchase their escape (Mejía jaguar-eyed as he thrust a single curse between the departing coward's shoulderblades); Charlotte's humiliated whispers to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who, so her women had pityingly assured her, could fructify any womb, should the heart but truly believe; and Charlotte pulling out her first grey hair, and Charlotte with her head down on her writing-desk (which once had belonged Marie Antoinette), silently weeping for hatred of Miramar; and the first time she withdrew her hand from his to walk alone at Chapultepec; and Fray Soria's clumsy attempt to comfort him there in the chapel below the cells, directing him to that absurd votive scene
,
painted as if by a young child, with the caption
On the 7th day of July in 1864, I, Ambrosio Alonso, having been captured and held as a guerrilla, was led out of jail to be killed although nothing had been completely proved against me, so I called upon the Lord of Wonders, who granted me this favor, so they released me, and I have commissioned this retablo,
*
giving thanks for the miracle—
good God, their literalist idols! These people were all primitives, as even Mejía continued to prove in his sad thirst for images of the Holy Child of Atocha, who, so it is said, used to slip between the bars of Moorish prisons to bring inexhaustible supplies of bread and water to Christian captives, and now sometimes liberated the oppressed; well, it might be so, and in any case religion must never be mocked. Fray Soria brought him another retablo to handle. It was childishly done, of course. But for the benefit of self-discipline he pretended to admire this likeness of the roundfaced, smallmouthed, smiling Child. Sunshine glowed around the tiny sombrero which floated on His reddish-brown curls as if upon the water; white ruffles encircled His throat and the plump baby-hands which peeked from the sleeves of His crimson robe. One hand held the basket
of loaves which resembled flowers, and the other a water-gourd on a stick, as He sat on his diminutive throne, old and young, sweet and knowing and unapproachable, more patient than ingratiating.
I petitioned the Holy Child, and . . .
The Emperor turned over the tin sheet, and in the matte darkness of the japanned iron saw his reflection as if in black water. Back came bad memories: his myriad brave soldiers who had been compelled to feed the earth with their own bloody hearts, Marshal Bazaine's perpetual yet ever-altering machinations, now recapitulated, ever since Bazaine together with his troops had abandoned the Empire, by the bustling night-vermin on that crusted bandage around Miramón's temples; not to mention the hangdog conferences, which all participants knew to be useless, regarding the interest, never mind the fiendish principal, on those infamous Jecker bonds (for which, to tell the truth, Miramón was to blame), Bazaine's bald head gleaming still more hatefully than his smile when he said: Unfortunately, Your Majesty, you must meet your obligations to France!—and the antlike, inimical, invincible vitality of Juárez, whom he had once thought to welcome into his cabinet (never mind the fact that in every respect he resembled a servant), and whose orders had put to death a hundred captured Legionnaires at San Jacinto; the sadistic self-importance of the unshaven mestizo
general and the three ragged colonels now sitting outside his cell, and none of their pistols clean; and that evening at Puebla on Charlotte's twenty-fifth birthday, when their well-meaning host, an elderly hidalgo who had served Emperor Iturbide, thought to put Their Majesties in one bedroom, and the nearly imperceptible twitching at the corners of Charlotte's mouth when the valet commenced to set matters right; the deciphered telegram with the word
APPOMATTOX
(had Lee defeated Grant, the United States could never have rescued Juárez), followed in due time by that letter on the familiar stationery of Louis Napoleon, who had lured him into this adventure, and promised never to abandon him, explaining that
in France it was no longer permissible to be mistaken
; the embarrassing vulgarities of that former Texas circus-dancer Princess Salm-Salm, who had just now tried to save him by offering herself to Colonel Palacio Villanueva; that vile farewell kiss from his brother, who had smoothly encouraged him to fall in with Napoleon's designs, then, when it was too late to withdraw without loss of honor, compelled him to renounce his Austrian
claims; the treachery of López, who had received so many preferments at his hands; the moment when he understood from an indiscretion of the physician that Charlotte had gone mad in Rome; the silence that long ago morning in their stateroom on the S.S.
Elisabeth
(in those years they still slept together) when Charlotte realized that he had lost interest in her seasickness, and her dull gaze when he packed her off to Madeira, while he continued on to Brazil, counting her tears through an ivory telescope, listening to her sobs through a curtain at Chapultepec, watching from between the curtains of his palace window as a young woman in a dark blue reboso, kneeling on the cobblestones, supported in her lap the naked, bleeding corpse of a boy, probably a son or younger brother, stroking the dead face, gazing steadily up at
him,
as if she knew he were there; while a semicircle of poor people began to cohere behind her, all of them staring at his window, until a whistle sounded, his French troops leveled their bayonets, and he turned away—and by no means had he forgotten Concha Miramón, freshly married, who kept watching him with gentle dark-eyed hatred, as if he were the reason her husband must die; nor did he decline to recall his first jailer in this place, the cruel peasant whose narrow speckled face resembled a jaguar's; he had locked Maximilian into the Capuchin crypt, sneering:
You must stay here for the night, so that you realize that your end is near.