Days of the Dead.pdf - Upgrade Systems

Consuela’s voice called back his thoughts as she ticked off names with her plump fingers. "There was
Santa Anna, of course, and two, maybe three, of his aides-young friends of Franz's, whose duty it is to
go about after the Presidente and add to his consequence. There were the two mad-doctors Franz
brought from town, Pichon and Laveuve, and in the opposing camp, so to speak, were the priests:
Josefa’s confessor Fray Ramiro, the priest she brought in from town to exorcise the demons of madness
from my father, and the priest Natividad's mother brought in from town to secretly wed my father and
Natividad while no one was looking."
"I'm sure that was responsible for some icy silences over the coq au vin," said Rose, climbing back
into the car­riage once more.
"I felt for the poor man, for even Josefa would not speak to him, and of course Señora Lorcha by that
time was trying to pretend that it had never happened." Consuela waved to the two maids to come, and
Sancho, with a bow of almost burlesque exaggeration, helped her up onto the high step. "There was also
Doña Imelda de Bujerio, and her son Don Rafael, who are also neighbors of my father, though Don
Rafael, like Fernando, prefers to remain at his town house in the city, and leaves his hacienda at
Fructosa to be managed by the mayor. Don Rafael is going to marry Valla-Valentina-so of course when
Señora Lorcha tried to marry Natividad to my father, it would mean my father repudiating Valla's mother,
Melosia, and making Valentina into a bastard who cannot inherit."
"I see that the wonder is not that someone was mur­dered at that gathering," remarked Rose as the
carriage jolted into motion again, "but that only one person suffered the ultimate penalty." She coughed
on the dust but left the glass windows of the coach open. Having 'spent four days on the Vera Cruz
diligencia debating whether to be suffocated or grilled, January could sympathize.
"Were it not that Franz was going to have Hannibal whipped-possibly to death-the moment the
company left," said Consuela, with a wry twist to her mouth, "I would have derived a good deal of
entertainment from watching my family at dinner, for of course Valentina flirted with all Santa Anna’s
young aides, and Doña Josefa would eat only a mouthful of dry bread, and pray for my brother, and
glare like a basilisk that turns men to stone. For two years, since she returned to my father's house on her
husband's death, she has begged my father to permit her to retire to the Convent of the Bleeding Heart of
Mary-because my father's investments kept her husband from going bankrupt when the centralistas
took over the government, he controls her money. And of course he re­fuses to pay the fees required by
the Convent. He says he has never heard anywhere that Christ dickered like a marriage-broker over the
dowries of his brides, and natu­rally the cost of a woman's upkeep for the remainder of her life in a place
of contemplation has never crossed his mind."
"Would your brother have let her retire?" asked January, leaning a little in the saddle to speak through
the window.
"I don't think so. He was a Protestant in his heart, my brother-en verdad, he became one, in fact,
when he en­tered the military school in Potsdam, though he recanted once he returned to Mexico. But it
was clear that he con­sidered the Mass a foolish superstition, and the saints no more than the old gods
dressed up in European clothing. And Don Anastasio, who is a scholar and a heretic, has pointed out that
he was not so wrong in this, at least in the villages, where churches stand on the foundations of the old
temples, and Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel wear the feathers of the warrior-god Huitzilopoctli in their
hair."
000
The hacienda of Mictlán stood at the edge of a small lake, a high adobe wall pale against the dark