Days of the Dead.pdf - Upgrade Systems

stairs. "I re­member Mother taking me to her mother's tomb to clean and whitewash it-she'd have her
cook make up a picnic lunch like everyone else who came to the cemetery that day, but I don't recall
anything about expecting Grandma to come out of the grave and share it with us."
She set the bags down at the top of the steps, put back the veils of her hat, and looked doubtfully at
the shut doors and shuttered windows. In the United States it would have been illegal for her to wear a
hat at all-women of color be­ing required to wear the tignon, or headscarf, of servi­tude-and January
delighted in the close-fitting bonnet, the neat, soft swags of her curls.
"Mother would take me to the white section of the cemetery, too, to hang a wreath on her father's
tomb and pay our respects to the family. They always pretended to the children that she was a `former
servant,' but of course they all knew. The Americans in New Orleans don't do any of that, do they?"
"That's because Americans breed behind fences like cats and don't have families, according to my
mother," re­marked January, picking out from the several doors the one with a large bronze knocker.
"Not that, as a former slave herself, my mother has a single ancestor in any graveyard in town-that she
knew about, at any rate. That never stopped her from having the cook make up a basket lunch and going
down to St. Louis Cemetery to spend the day visiting with her friends."
He was raising his hand to the knocker when the door flew open. A voice inside cried, "Señor Enero!
Madre de Dios, come in! My house is yours, and everything in it thank God you have come!" And a
small crimson whirl­wind bustled forth to catch him in a tight embrace.
"And Señorita Rose!" Consuela Montero turned, her plump hands and ample décolletage still flashing
with gar­nets though she'd loosened her raven curls in preparation for siesta. "The lady who made the
fireworks for the opera!"
Rose laughed as they were drawn into the salon-the formal and rather bare room common to the inns
they had stayed at in Vera Cruz and on the road. Like those at the inns, it contained only a long table
running down the mid­dle, and ten heavily carved chairs ranged around the walls. A painting of the Virgin
adorned one wall, above a blue-­and-white Chinese vase of roses. Elsewhere, rather surpris­ingly, hung
a small Turner in a gold frame.
"Señorita Rose no longer," said January gravely. "Madame... Señora Enero, my wife."
"En verdad? Felicitación, Rosita ... may I call you Rose?" Consuela tiptoed to kiss Rose's dusty
cheek. "Señor, Señora... this is my companion Doña Gertrudis de Avila de Caldofranco...." She gestured
to the black-clothed woman who had stood beside the door through all of this, a look of impassive
disapproval on her high-born Spanish countenance. "Though why it is considered correct to keep a
chaperone here when all the town knows one is living in sin with a violin-player-that's enough, Trudis,
now go fetch us wine and cakes, and have Lita make up the spare bedroom for my guests-you will, of
course, remain as my guests? Hannibal will be overjoyed.... You got my letter?"
"We got a letter from Hannibal."
"He wrote one, then? I did also, once it became clear that that imbecile Ward, the minister of the
British, was going to do nothing." Consuela led the way through a door into her own bedroom, which like
many in both Mexico and France-and indeed in the older houses of New Orleans as well-was set up as
an informal parlor. There were comfortable chairs, a pianoforte January couldn't help touching a key and
found it was in tune-and another small modern painting, an English cathedral beneath an as­tonishing sky.
"That adaquin Ylario-the junior intendant of police in this city-has been out to the hacienda three times