Then one day (it had been but a year) they led him and his wives to a boat, whose fittings were plainer than he would have expected, and carried him across a lake toward a volcanic desert, while his wives sang him songs which he had never heard. He began to feel desolate. When they reached the other shore, the Mexicans stripped him of his headdress and his mantle of butterflies and flowers, took his dark mirror, and ripped away his earbobs, pendants and lip-plugs, so that all that remained to him were his sandals, his loincloth and his incomparable flutes. He felt much as he had upon learning that Bazaine had destroyed all the munitions which could not be embarked from Veracruz. When it rains in Trieste, the pinks and peaches of the edifices go grey; and so it now seemed to go with the moments of his life, which muted more with each removal. His four wives said farewell to him one by one, calmly and without sadness. Concepción had pulled her shift back on, and Charlotte was once again well laced up, while Dominga, already in her grubby skirts, was throwing on her black-and-white linen reboso, one end of which dangled in front, the other behind her head; while Maria Amalia had once more become a marble effigy. He entreated them not to abandon him (which of course in waking life he would have been too proud to do), but they regarded him like empty-eyed stone goddesses, and the boatmen rowed them away, leaving him alone on that lava jetty.
Perhaps they would now give him some lesser wife with naked jade breasts and a black slit between her gleaming jade thighs, and black eye-holes and nostrils, and an oval black mouth-hole; perhaps they would recompense him with a spiderweb hung with turquoise beads; already he felt unfitted for the greater treasures of his brief epitome. His heart was as tobacco-stained as a Mexicana’s hand. Threading his way between overgrown wells and courts, past broken waist-high columns, between broken walls and great stone heads half-sunken in the earth, he saw a barren stone breast, cracked, wide and grey, touching the low evening clouds, and sunshine silvering the edges of its dark steps. In the second year of his reign he had left Charlotte to administer the Empire while he climbed the Temple of the Sun — a grimly glorious experience. This pyramid was hardly so grand; on the contrary, it seemed to have been deliberately neglected. For a moment he could hope that he had been likewise dismissed. He looked around him. There was Tlaloc’s wife Chalchiutlicue the water goddess, carved out of a tall block of stone, with her great flat headdress, wide eyes, and tiny indrawn arms. Bazaine’s great bald head, fashioned out of lava, lay half-buried in the cindery dirt. On the faraway ridgetops right and left he spied columns of silhouetted waters. So be it. Blowing a melody on his turquoise flute, he climbed the first stair. As yet the grief of leavetaking remained moderate. If the summit of the temple were abandoned, then he would go his own way, living out his life in grateful inconspicuousness. Essaying to dream of his white suit and green-veiled hat, in hope that his valets would presently appear to dress him, misery meanwhile aching in his chest, he completed that melody, which seemed to him the loveliest he had ever played. Then, as he began to ascend the uneven stone steps whose variegations made them resemble snake-scales, he saw the terrifying priests waiting above. At least he had never had to be one of those people who carries his own cross. So in resignation he climbed the steps, breaking his beautiful flutes one by one. Gazing back down across the lawn of weeds and ruins to the jetty and the lake, he searched for the boat, but it was gone. Across the lake he seemed to see Miramar’s white tower with an orange light shining from one window, as if Charlotte were still alive and awaiting him. He thought he heard the general and three colonels singing the song about the wounded rider who goes through the world, bravely seeking death. He remembered once at Chapultepec glimpsing in the file of guerrilleros being led off to execution still another strange boy whose long eyelashes were drooping and whose mouth was half open as if with astonishment and exhaustion even while his chin somehow preserved a manly squareness; he intended to be as that boy had been. His grief had scarcely yet increased. Up those steep, dark and grubby stairs he continued bravely, breaking his last flute and throwing it behind him. When he neared the crowning platform, the priests drew back a little, as if to encourage him; the instant he set foot on it, they seized him, dragged him to the stone basin, which was painted red and blue, and uplifted their obsidian knives. He smiled at them, although he could not understand why he must die. The sky was already filling with vultures.