Dominga.
Don’t weep. God wishes this. How old are you?
Fourteen.
You’re quite goodhearted. Set it on the table. Now here’s a present for you.
His feeble desire for her departed; he rose, and presented her with a gold ounce engraved with his profile. There was plenty left over for the firing squad. At first she grew as round-eyed as Tlaloc, their cruel god of rain. Then she burst into tears in earnest, and refused to take it, so he smilingly wrapped her fingers around the coin and said: Thank you, Dominga. I’d better sleep now.
Goodnight, sir. I’ll pray for you, both tonight and tomorrow.
Goodnight, my girl.
He had never felt so tired. The instant she departed, he took the pill in his hands, sniffed it (it smelled fresh and resinous) and swallowed it down. What did he care if it were poison?
It was a quarter past nine-o’-clock. Next door, Mejía and Fray Soria were praying to the Holy Child for comfort in bondage. He could hear Fray Soria’s deep voice. By nine-thirty he had begun to feel refreshed by a warm lassitude. The guards were arguing in the corridor. He read a few pages more of Cantù’s History of Italy. Miramón had lent him his own favorite volume, the Imitation of Christ, which he found too fervent, like his smallheaded, wide-skirted bride. He preferred history.
At ten-o’-clock, deliciously drowsy, he blew out both candles. At midnight General Escobedo came to say goodbye to him. During the two hours in between he slept deeply. And this is what he dreamed.
He seemed to see the double doors of a casket fly open — and his own corpse, popeyed and powdered horribly white, stared straight up at him, with buttons shining from the throat and down most of the abdomen. His head had grown astonishingly round and the collar of his suit was buttoned so tight under the chin that he seemed to lack any neck. Perhaps a bullet had mutilated him there, or, as might be, the embalmer had needed to draw something out through his throat. Shiny black boots rose all the way up to his torso. No part of him appeared real, except for his chalk-white hands. His bifurcated moustache, greatly impoverished from its living state, could have been painted on in two long ink-strokes. As for that round white head of his, it was the crudest effigy of clay or plaster (perhaps the embalmer had unfleshed his skull), while the rest of him lay preposterously long and shapeless. From the thing’s very confinement, meagerness, hardness and rigidity he somehow knew it to be himself. This was what he had come to, in death as in life.
At least it appeared that, as he had requested for his mother’s sake, the executioners had left his face unmarred.
Presently he became accustomed to what he was. And once he said to himself: Very well, let me be a corpse, he felt easier, and the casket-doors closed. Now he was permitted to rise away from himself. The sun resembled the halo around the head of Our Lady of Refuge, and he gazed down on the casket when Juárez arrived, and two soldiers opened it. The President, small and dark, was the sort of man who should have been a servant at two and a half reales per day. He looked at the corpse’s face in silence, then turned away. Maximilian observed him pityingly.
Now the envoy from Vienna had disembarked, and Juárez made any number of difficulties, in order to teach the Habsburgs their place; but at last the casket began to ride away in a black-curtained caratella* over mountain roads and past great stone heads half sunken in the earth, until it reached the coast, where the Novara lay at anchor. Their Mexican Majesties had departed Miramar on this very ship; and there had been a hundred-gun salute. Now came the return voyage in the black-draped salon of the Novara, back to Istria; here by Ragusa lay the isle of Lacroma, whose ruined monastery he would have rebuilt had he not fallen so deeply into debt for Miramar; hearing this, darling Charlotte had bought the island for him as a surprise. And so his corpse came home, to pigeons and white sea-light, while he watched above, and the black-creped hearse waited in Trieste to receive it. He had become Massimiliano again. A weeping peasant woman raised up the little child in her arms, so that he could outstretch his chubby hand toward the casket. People in black stood bowing and crossing themselves; among the younger and poorer he seemed to recognize some who in childhood had found gifts beneath one of those four Christmas trees at Miramar. Had they finally forgiven him for being Austrian? His brother’s secret police feared him no longer. Nowadays they even guarded his monument, which read: MASSIMILIANO, IMPERATORE DEL MESSICO. He felt great joy and comfort to see them looking after him in this way. Here he had embarked on his first long sea voyage — seventeen years ago! In the fleet they still respected his innovations; he had retrofitted ships and enacted the great dockyard at Pula. The flags flew at half-mast everywhere in Trieste, except of course at Miramar, where Charlotte was not to be told. For the first time he wondered whether she might remain alive. To abdicate the Empire, having already signed away his Austrian rights, and be confined here with her, year after year — and if she were truly mad…
She used to say: Anything is better than to sit contemplating the sea at Miramar, with nothing to do but watch the years go by.
He fancied he could almost see her in the Oriental Salon, looking through the tall narrow casements into the sea.
With great relief he saw that he, at least, was still dead. Ever so gently they carried him into the black-decked car of the special train. The cathedral bell tolled; the train began to move. Overhead he followed, smiling down on the Friulian vineyards. The grapevine, they say, lives sixty or seventy years, like one of us. He could not tell why this pleased him. His sensations resembled the sweetness of visiting Maria Amalia’s grave in Madeira (Charlotte, of course, had not been pleased). Just as when upon first disembarking from the S.S. Elisabeth in his snow-white suit and stepping into the Brazilian jungle he had nearly shouted for joy, because all the butterflies his wealth and labor had gathered into his cabinet at Miramar seemed to rise up into rainbows about him, and the exotic botanical curiosities in his glasshouse unfurled into towering fullness overhead, their flowery vininesses as seductive as the way that Charlotte used to part her hair when she was nineteen, so as the special train sighed onward his true self expanded and blossomed, drinking the incense of freedom; it was the moment when the book gains life and the dream grows real at last. Just before his Empire ended he had sent to Miramar for two thousand nightingales; they were en route when he was captured. Now all these birds were rising and singing around him. Slowly, slowly they journeyed, with the bells tolling in each place they passed, so that at last he felt loved. And ever more slowly they rolled into Vienna, where again the casket was opened, his brother standing stiff and straight with fists clenched at his sides, while his mother bent forward to kiss his forehead. Why couldn’t she have done that before? The heaviness of her bowing reminded him of the drooping of Christ’s head upon the cross, and she kissed his whitish-yellow forehead. Then he was carried to the Habsburg crypt, and with a golden key they locked him safely into a tomb of pure marble.
Next he dreamed that after the Mexicans had called upon him to be Emperor they took him in hand and crowned him with a quetzal-feather headdress whose semicirclet of long and close-packed jade tendrils was underlined by soft red arcs of blood-red and sky-blue, dyed by their artisans in the great city where he reigned amidst cool night winds. They presented him with a palace of onyx, whose windows overlooked jungle branches against a rainy sky. There they taught him to play many flutes most delightfully and to inhale the perfumes of flowers as would a nobleman of the highest degree. One of his flutes was fashioned of jade, changeably green like Charlotte’s eyes; and its mouthpiece was the semblance of a lizard’s head. Another flute was of fragrant wood, and a third of bone inlaid with silver and gold; there were as many others as he desired; and they all belonged to him. But what he enjoyed even more than playing his beautiful flutes was sniffing the fresh flowers which the Mexicans presented to him. This brought him great joy; and even in the dream he faintly remembered the vanilla-scents and orange-blossoms of Cuernavaca. They pierced his ears and hung golden rings from them, which pleased him still more than when every member of his suite had been personally decorated by Napoleon. They gave him golden bat-pendants and jade lip-plugs for his own; whenever he liked, he drank triple-refined pulque from a jaguar-legged bowl, and he could not imagine any greater contentment. They bestowed upon him a mirror of black obsidian. Then they led to him his first love Maria Amalia de Gloria, and she was naked but for a headdress of flowers. Next they gave him Charlotte, who had become seventeen again, nearly as huge-eyed and delicate as when she was that child in the portrait by Winterhalter, with her white, white arms and white throat, and she too was naked, but she bore an ear of corn in her hand; and she and Maria Amalia greeted one another without embarrassment. When they presented her to him, he sensed that within his love for her grew something secret, beautiful, yet painful; it could have been a many-fingered jade-blue fern guarded by orchids; whether it was something intrinsic to her or to their marriage, or whether it might be inimical and extrinsic was better uninvestigated. But by then they were bringing to him Concepción, the gardener’s daughter with the long blue-black hair, whom he had left pregnant with his child, and she too was naked, and entered with shy little steps, carrying water in an apple-jade cup; she had always reminded him of the dove which in so many votive images rests upon the clasped hands of Our Lady of the Incarnation. Finally they presented him with the cigarillo girl Dominga who had brought this treasure of sleep to him, and she was lovelier than he had realized now that he saw her undressed among the others; it turned out that her brown skin was as smooth as Charlotte’s; and she held salt in the palm of her left hand; the other women rushed to kiss her, just as the cherubs come winging to crown Our Lady of Light. These four now became his wives, loving him and one another, so that he never had to choose between them. So again he felt as he had upon entering the Brazilian jungle, with all his greenhoused and cabineted joys blooming up to veil the entire world in reality’s fragrant mist. Concepción opened her arms to him, while Dominga danced with Maria Amalia, their jade ornaments clattering, and Charlotte reclined on the terrace, playing with the pearls of her necklace, slowly loosening her hold on her painted fan, another brilliant sunset spent. And it seemed that for a very long time he reigned in easy ecstasy, never ageing, with nothing to do but play the flute, embrace his women, discover himself in the obsidian mirror, and sniff the fragrances of flowers, which he came to distinguish with such expert knowledge that he seemed the wisest being in the world. Charlotte fed him of her tender corn-flesh, her small head nodding on that long pale neck. He drank from the body of Concepción, and ate salt from Dominga’s skin while she tilted her head, watching him like a mother at her son’s marriage, a lover memorizing her sweetheart’s face or a wife leaving her husband forever. He crowned Maria Amalia with a wreath like unto the ruby roses and turquoise roses which retablo painters so often place around the brow of Our Lady of the Incarnation; and wherever she touched it, up grew a jade stem with many green pricklepods of gems, rising and glittering, until it budded into a flower as pink as her vulva.