General Escobedo now awoke him, speaking exactly the right words of valor and chivalry, so that his heart was comforted; and for a moment more they reminisced, as if they had campaigned side by side, instead of fighting one against the other. Both had experienced San Blas’s red gnats, whose sting induces days of blindness; and both had been many times bemused by the vultures in Veracruz’s sandy streets. The Emperor shook the general’s hand. He heard Fray Soria murmuring in Miramón’s cell. Presently he knelt before the crucifix, and prayed again for his mother, Charlotte, his brother and himself. The reek of cigarillo smoke increased in the corridor. He heard more footsteps than usual echoing downstairs. The last time he had ever seen her, Charlotte’s lovely white oval face had been framed by the dark reboso as she gazed out scared and stiff. Thank goodness she was at peace! He prayed for Concepción and her baby. He prayed for Juárez. He wondered whether he ought to pray for the people of Mexico. He washed his face. As he was dressing he heard one of the colonels spitting on the floor. In good time the first cock crowed, and he rose, ready for a sunrise which would resemble oil paint on a cheap sheet of tin.
He made a good end, of course. Blond-bearded, he comforted his weeping confessor, Fray Soria, while the sombrero’d guards stood waiting at the door of his cell. The sun ascended, ready to drink his blood. Against his will he remembered the gleam of Bazaine’s head and that daily homily: Your Majesty, you fail to understand that Mexico is not Algeria. — In the streets, Mexicanas stood smoking cigarillos and watched him being led out. The smell of tortillas reminded him that he had received no breakfast. He found himself peering around for Dominga, that interesting damsel with her bag of fine-cut tobacco, but she was nowhere in evidence. An old woman spat at his feet. His escort indicated the cart in which he was to ride. The colonel inquired whether he had any complaints. — The Emperor told him: Never complain, for it is a sign of weakness.
When they stood him against the wall there on the Hill of Bells, picking their teeth and wiping their foreheads, so inferior to his own troops, who had sparkled in their new caps and uniforms as they formed ranks in hope of immortality, neither he nor the spectators blinked. After all, they were people for whom it was nothing to see a gaunt white corpse strewn with bullet-wounds as if with roses.
He wondered what would become of his two thousand nightingales.
They shot him first. According to some accounts, his last words were: Vive Mexico! Next went jadehearted Miramón, then Mejía, who was so weak from typhus that he could barely stand. Both of them shouted: God bless the Emperor!
As for the Empress, she outlived the spidery cactus behind the half-wrecked wall of long adobe bricks where the three were executed. (Pitying romantics erected a shrine there in 1901.) Peering out the window of her madhouse palace, she glimpsed World War I and said: One sees red. One supposes there is something going on because one is not gay. The frontier is black, very black. — Before she knew it, she was old, fumbling and weeping.
Why did she suffer so long? This question finds a Mexican answer. When we choose a young man to incarnate Tezcatlipoca, the obsidian-mirrored god of kingliness, we kill him after a year of every good thing, so that our other young men will remain strong. — And in the month of Ochpaniztli falls the feast for Teteoinan, goddess of the ripe corn. Because weeping causes rain, which would be harmful at this season, we clothe her incarnator in gorgeous stuffs and lead her to believe that she will soon be brought into a great man’s bed, so that she laughs for pleasure and pride. Presently we mount her on another woman’s back. Then we decapitate her at once, and flay her, after which an outstanding man puts on her skin. This is what happened first to Maria Amalia and later to Concepción; for both got carried off young. — * But when a woman is chosen to be Ilamatecuhtli, the Old Princess, we must not permit her to be happy; for this is in Tititl, the seventeenth month, when we languish for rain. Only tears will bring that. So before we kill her, she must weep and weep, while she dances alone.
When he had lain in doubt as to whether or not to accept the Mexican crown, she told him: Well, you have your butterflies. For my part, Max, I prefer a full and active life, with duties and responsibilities — and even difficulties if you will — to an idle existence spent in contemplating the sea from the top of a rock until the age of seventy. — But the rain which is our life required more of her than that; not until her eighty-seventh year could she escape. They say she died surrounded by the wide-eyed flabby smiles of ever so many amateurishly painted votive images.
THE CEMETERY OF THE WORLD
Woe is me, Llorona!
Llorona, whether yes or no;
the light which illumines me (oh, Llorona!)
leaves me in darkness at the end.
Veracruz used to be called the cemetery of the world on account of the plagues within its unsanitary walls. The following tale, whose heroine is even older than faded epaulettes, muted ribbons and those enameled decorations whose rows of narrow colored rectangles have long since been dusted down into pastels, may excite your doubt; but its setting’s pestilential virulence shines undeniable through the centuries, like the humid sunlight of that coast. The victims failed almost infallibly, first swelling until their rings cut deep into their fingers and their faces bulged with pus, so that at the moment of decease they often wore the fleshy-lipped grimace of an Olmec head. Three chroniclers date the worst outbreak of the disease to 1646, when the city refashioned its slaughterhouse into lodging for infantry companies. In sternly understated accents, a certain Fray Domínguez reasons out the effects of that miasma, contained within greasy dungstained walls and concentrated by tropic swelter, upon demoralized, unhygienic conscripts whose main diversion was drunken congress with the harlots of the port. But in the most ancient volume of the Archives of the Ayuntamiento de Veracruz, a ledger whose pages have broken loose from their grimy leather shell and whose inner knotted cords lie exposed, an unknown official not long after 1608 offered the proposition, unlike the apparent arguments which are lately proffered so commonly, that because the city (founded in 1519 by Cortés himself, who called it Villarica de la Veracruz, or Bera Cruz), occupied the site of the indigenous town of Quiahuyiztlaín, which the conquistadors had so brutally erased, a curse exhaled itself undyingly from the bloody soil. And in confirmation of the same I do here avow and swear upon my faith that in the hour after Vespers the figure of a veiled woman hath oftimes been seen, who upon unwrapping her face, which is said to be that of a low caste Indian or mestiza, breathes forth her diseased breath, whereupon people rapidly sicken, excepting only some scant few persons whom God hath spared, in order that they might make known to us these facts. Her dress is green, like unto a serpent’s hue, and she has been known to… in her left hand. For which reason… the jade fever. And then much writing is missing, thanks to layer upon layer of wormtracks which long ago riddled these pages into cunning paper cutouts of ice-floes and islands; following which a different hand informs us: It may be recorded that on the twenty-fifth of last January the Civil Fiscal consulted me as follows… — a round seal enclosing a crown upon a quartered circle. I myself give any curse small credit, since in 1599 Veracruz was relocated a trifle east of Villarica, and the plagues continued. At any rate, herewith: