* * *
Sept. 23. I locked myself in the bedroom and barricaded the door with everything I could lay my hands on. I was sure it would do no good, but I thought I could at least give myself the illusion of being able to sleep with tranquillity. Those measured footsteps, always as if on dry leaves; I thought I heard them every moment. I knew they weren’t real, that is, until I heard the faintest rustle outside the door, and then the whisper of something passed beneath the door. I turned on the light; the corner of an envelope was outlined against the velvety floor. For a moment I held its contents in my hand: old paper, elegant, rosewood.
Written in a spidery hand, large, erect letters, the message consisted of one word:
TLACTOCATZINE
Sept. 23. She will come, as she did yesterday and the day before, at sunset. I will speak to her today; she can’t escape me, I will follow her through the hidden entry among the vines …
* * *
Sept. 23. As the clock was striking six, I heard music in the salon; it was the magnificent old Pleyel, playing waltzes. As I approached, the sound ceased. I turned back to the library. She was in the garden. Now she was skipping about, pantomiming … a little girl playing with her hoop. I opened the door, went out, I don’t know exactly what happened; I felt as if the sky, as if the very air descended one level to press down on the garden; the air became motionless, fathomless, and all sound was suspended. The old woman stared at me, always with the same smile, her eyes lost in the depths of the world; her mouth opened, her lips moved; no sound emanated from that pale slit, the garden was squeezed like a sponge, the cold buried its fingers in my flesh …
* * *
Sept. 24. After the apparition at dusk, I came to my senses sitting in the armchair in the library; the French doors were locked, the garden solitary. The odor of the everlastings has permeated the house; it is particularly intense in my bedroom. There I awaited a new missive, a new sign from the aged woman. Her words, the flesh of silence, were struggling to tell me something … At eleven that evening I could sense beside me the dull light of the garden. Again the whisper of the long, starched skirts outside my door; and the letter:
My beloved
The moon has risen and I hear it singing; everything is indescribably beautiful.
I dressed and went downstairs to the library; a veil-become-light enveloped the old woman, who was sitting on the garden bench. I walked toward her, again amid the buzzing of bumblebees. The same air, void of any sound, enveloped her. Her white light ruffled my hair, and the aged woman took my hands and kissed them; her skin pressed against mine. I saw this; my eyes told me what touch would not corroborate: her hands in mine were nothing but wind — heavy, cold wind; I intuited the opaque ice in the skeleton of this kneeling figure whose lips moved in a litany of forbidden rhythms. The everlastings trembled, solitary, independent of the wind. They smelled of the grave. Yes, they grew there, in the tomb: there they germinated, there they were carried every evening in the spectral hands of an ancient woman … and sound returned, amplified by the rain, and a coagulated voice, an echo of spilled blood copulating still with the earth, screamed:
“Kapuzinergruft! Kapuzinergruft!”
I jerked free from her hands and ran to the front door of the mansion — even there I heard the mad sound of her voice, the drowned dead echoing in the cavernous throat — and I sank to the floor trembling, clutching the doorknob, drained of the strength to turn it.
I couldn’t; it was impossible to open.
It is sealed with a thick red lacquer. In the center, a coat of arms glimmers in the night, a crowned double eagle, the old woman’s profile, signaling the icy intensity of permanent confinement.
And that night I heard behind me — I did not know I was to hear it for all time — the whisper of skirts brushing the floor; she walks with a new, ecstatic joy; her gestures are repetitious, betraying her satisfaction. The satisfaction of a jailer, of a companion, of eternal prison. The satisfaction of solitude shared. I heard her voice again, drawing near, her lips touching my ear, the breath fabricated of spume and buried earth:
“… and they didn’t let us play with our hoops, Max; they forbade us; we had to carry them in our hands during our walks through the gardens in Brussels … but I told you that in a letter, the letter I wrote from Bouchot, do you remember? Oh, but from now on, no more letters, we’ll be together forever, the two of us in this castle … We will never leave; we will never allow anyone to enter … Oh, Max, answer me, the everlastings, the ones I bring in the evenings to the Capuchin crypt, to the Kapuzinergruft, don’t they smell fresh? They’re the same flowers the Indians brought you when we arrived here: you, the Tlactocatzine … Nis tiquimopielia inin maxochtzintl … Remember? Lord, we offer you these flowers…”
And on the coat of arms I read the inscription:
Charlotte, Kaiserin von Mexiko
Mother’s Day
For Teodoro Cesarman
Every morning Grandfather vigorously stirs his cup of instant coffee. He grasps the spoon as in other times my dear-departed grandmother Clotilde had grasped the pestle, or he himself, General Vicente Vergara, had grasped the pommel of the saddle now hanging on his bedroom wall. Then he uncorks the bottle of tequila and tilts it to fill half the cup. He refrains from mixing the tequila and the Nescafé. Let the clear alcohol settle by itself. He looks at the bottle of tequila and it reminds him how red was the spilled blood, how clear the liquor that set the blood boiling, inflaming it before the great encounters, Chihuahua and Torreón, Celaya and Paso de Gavilanes, when men were men and there was no way to distinguish between the exhilaration of drunkenness and the recklessness of combat, sí, señor, how could fear creep in when a man’s pleasure was battle and the battle was his pleasure?
He almost spoke aloud, between sips of the spiked coffee. Nobody knew how to make a café de olla any more, the little jug of coffee tasting of clay and brown sugar, no, nobody, not even the pair of servants he’d brought from the sugar plantation in Morelos. Even they drank Nescafé, invented in Switzerland, the cleanest and most orderly nation in the world. General Vergara had a vision of snowcapped mountains and belled cows, but he said nothing, his false teeth still lay at the bottom of the glass before him. This was his favorite hour: peace, daydreams, memories, fantasies, and no one to gainsay them. Strange, he sighed, that he’d lived such a full life and now memory should come back to him like a sweet lie. He sat and thought about the years of the Revolution and the battles that had forged modern Mexico. Then he spit out the mouthful of liquid he’d been swishing between his lizard tongue and his toughened gums.
* * *
Later that morning I saw my grandfather in the distance, shuffling along in his carpet slippers as he always did, down the marble halls, wiping with a large kerchief the bleariness and involuntary tears from his cactus-colored eyes. Seeing him from that distance, almost motionless, I thought he looked like a desert plant. Green, rubbery, dry as the plains of the north, a deceptive ancient cactus harboring the sparse rains in its entrails from one summer to the next, fermenting them: moisture seeped from his eyes but never reached the white tufts on his head, wisps of dried corn silk. In his photographs, on horseback, he loomed tall. As he scuffed along, purposeless and old, through the marble rooms of the huge house in Pedregal, he looked tiny, lean, pure bone, the skin clinging desperately to his skeleton, a taut, creaky little old man. But not bowed, no sir, I’d like to see the man who dared …