The Living Infinite, page 25
“What way?” Tomás asked. He wanted to know. He wanted to hear her express herself to him as she had done with no other. He could not claim her as a wife, but perhaps he could claim her mind, be the man with whom she could be honest.
“Like this,” she said, curled her hand into a fist and rested it on the wall beside her. “A stranger to their own instinct, so determined by their titles of ‘infante’ that even their hearts beat only with permission.”
Tomás took one cautious step forward. Eulalia reached up and touched her left temple, as if adjusting a phantom diadem. “I see the future, Tomás. In it, I am an old lady, sitting in a tufted chair, staring out of a window. In Paris, perhaps. Would that I could imagine the scene in Havana or here in New York. I am old, and alone. The light is fading. And yet, someone comes in with a paper for me to sign, more duties, Tomás, more duties. And a photographer will take one last posed photograph of me, one that will run in the newspapers after I’m buried in the crypt with all of the other Bourbons—”
“Eulalia—”
“And I will think to myself that all I had wanted in life was to be able to dance when a song played, laugh myself to tears in public, or steal an apple from a cart when no one was looking.” She was talking to the floor, her face expressive and her eyes teary, watching her own foot make circles on the carpet, pushing the pile to and fro.
Eulalia was just about to say something else when Tomás, who had taken just one more step, kissed her on the mouth. For a moment, she returned the kiss, and Tomás could feel her adjusting to his height. Then she moved her head away and found his palm, which had been upon her cheek. There she dropped a light kiss, and then pushed against him so that she was outside the doorway.
They stood in silence for a moment. Tomás was shaking, and he could not still his knees. Eulalia looked past him, out the window. “The rain has stopped,” she said hoarsely.
Tomás turned to look. When he turned back, Eulalia was gone.
2
Tomás and Eulalia did not speak of what happened. The following day saw their departure from New York, a two-day trip by train that kept them separated from one another. Tomás rode in a car for gentlemen, and among these quiet, smoking men, he found a measure of peace. The kiss had rattled him, made him feel certain that Eulalia would dismiss him, or that Antonio would somehow know, and that he would wake in the morning staring down the barrel of a pistol. He reminded himself that such turns of event happened in novels, and not at the Hotel Savoy in the Louis XV suite. The line of reasoning helped only a little.
On the train, he spoke to a Chicagoan, who delighted to hear that Tomás was part of the Spanish assembly. “Wait until you see Lake Michigan,” said the man. He was ruddy-cheeked, and his lashes were long, looking to Tomás like a strange, grown doll. His hair was trim, and he wore it combed forward, covering a bald spot, the curls of the ends tickling his forehead. “I’ve just been to a funeral,” the man said, thumbing the threadbare edge of his coat. “They say one shouldn’t wear anything new to a funeral.”
“My condolences,” Tomás said. He caught most of what the man was saying, and felt as if his English had improved since his arrival in America, as if somewhere in his brain, ties that bound him linguistically were being snipped and set free.
“Jim Hawkins,” the man said, and extended a hand. “I work for Mr. Burnham. The architect for the Exposition.” He wiped at a line of sweat on his upper lip, then removed the shabby coat. “I’ll tell you what, your visit seems a kind of miracle. A prince and princess among us, imagine that. Makes us all proud, the hog butchers, the schoolchildren, the carriage drivers, and the architects. The best part is that Chicago won out as the location for the Exposition, beating almighty New York and trouncing St. Louis. You and your people being here is the stamp of approval we needed. Chicago delivers on its promises, I tell you that.”
The man was only the beginning of Tomás’ encounter with a kind of pride of city he had never witnessed. Perhaps it was the Exposition. Perhaps it was the sense of a city finally maturing. Perhaps it was the country, having gotten so large, proclaiming not one great city but two, and a future that promised, three, four, five great cities, just as populous and gleaming.
Once in the city, they were greeted at the Palmer House by Mrs. Bertha Palmer, the wife of Potter Palmer, who had built the hotel for Bertha as a wedding gift. Bertha Palmer waited in the center of the hotel’s main floor in a white gown. A circlet of diamonds rested in her hair, a diamond lavaliere hung from her neck, and a diamond pin shaped like an eagle sat on her shoulder.
“Demasiado,” Eulalia whispered to Tomás, and he agreed. Under the chandelier, Bertha Palmer absolutely glittered, but the effect was garish rather than refined.
“Su alteza,” Bertha Palmer said, and curtsied stiffly. Then, without a word from Eulalia, she told them about the Exposition, and her role in it. “I am the president of the Board of Lady Managers, and as such, I have had the honor, a true honor, su alteza, of organizing the Women’s Building. Such art! Such murals. And look,” she said, snapping her fingers. A maid scampered forward at once, and held in her open palm a glossy coin. “I petitioned congress for it. A quarter, in honor of your ancestor, Isabella the First.” This, Bertha Palmer plucked from the maid’s hand and presented to Eulalia, like a communion wafer.
Eulalia took the coin, thanking her hostess, who beamed and put her hands over her heart and was silent, at last.
The Spanish assemblage was shown to their suite of rooms, which were decorated with white lilies atop every surface. From the windows they could see, in the distance, the buildings of the Exposition, which had been nicknamed the White City. In the sunlight, they were blinding to look at, such an intense whiteness, that Tomás thought of Jules Verne’s air balloon among the clouds at once. In such a place, thought Tomás, the impossible might just be possible.
The infanta was scheduled to see the Spanish Building, the Women’s Building, the Electricity Building, and the Palace of Fine Arts the following day. But that afternoon and evening were, for once, hers. Maids came in and out of the parlor that connected all of the rooms. They watered the lilies and set up plates of cookies and a steaming pot of tea. Antonio, meanwhile, excused himself. He had suffered from a sore throat all day, and a doctor had been sent for. The physician, a burly Chicago man and Bertha Palmer’s personal doctor, diagnosed him with an allergy to the dust in the city, and gave him a drink of honey and laudanum, then ordered him to have bacon for dinner. “The grease will be soothing,” he said, before leaving without a bow or “good day.”
Antonio retired to sleep off the medicine, and, once the maids were done, Tomás and Eulalia found themselves alone again.
“I want to see it all,” she said. “But not as Eulalia. Do you understand?” Tomás understood at once, and he set off to explore the hotel, discovering two back entrances near the kitchens, and a stairwell used by the maids. Together, the two of them left the Palmer House without saying a word to anyone. They would need a carriage to get to the exposition, so instead, they wandered up State Street, her arm in his, and were soon lost among the bustling Chicagoans. In one direction, dozens of carriages of all kinds rumbled by, and in the other, streetcars, stuffed with people, rang their bells.
Tomás walked with his gaze to the sky. The buildings were so tall here, and once or twice he stumbled.
“They block the view,” Eulalia said, meaning the buildings. “The lake is right there, and yet we can’t see it.”
“They can,” Tomás said, pointing at the windows of the buildings, and at one or two very tall homes.
“Yes, but down here, I cannot. Nor can you. It seems selfish to me,” she said. “In Spain, we let the common people have the best views. Think of Santander. A palace would suit there, what with the spectacular cliffs and the sea, and yet the palace is in Madrid.”
Tomás thought for a moment before speaking. “I think you overstate things sometimes,” he said. Eulalia stopped cold, and Tomás thought, I have ruined it.
But she was not concerned with him. Instead, she was suddenly stopped by a newspaper boy, thrusting the evening edition in her face, yelling over the ruckus of the traffic.
“A princess on Lake Michigan’s shore,” he yelled. “Won’t you have her? Won’t you have the Spanish Infanta?”
Amused, Eulalia said, “I suppose I’d like to see what she is like, yes,” and she paid the boy with the Isabella coin she had received that morning, plucking it out of her glove.
“I d-don’t have change,” the boy stammered, but Eulalia waved him off, her nose already in the paper. The boy ran as fast as he could down State Street. She wandered into the shade of a building and Tomás followed her.
She smiled as she read, and Tomás knew the stories must be flattering ones. “If they could see me now,” she said, “all rumpled from two days on a train, they wouldn’t say such nice things.”
Tomás held his tongue. What he wanted to say was, “Dios, who cares what they think?” and other things that were too full of feeling. What he said was, “My mother would have liked to have seen this place, blocked views and all.”
Eulalia sighed, folding the newspaper as she did so. “If Ama had come with us, I don’t believe we would be taking this stroll.” Tomás laughed. “Probably not.” How he missed her, he realized. Knowing that he could not longer go to her, or feel her soft touch upon his cheek, brought him to the edge of tears.
“Tomorrow, we will see all of it, and we will toast to Amalia somewhere in the White—”
A streetcar clanged past, obscuring Eulalia’s words. Tomás heard none of it, but he smiled at her anyway and said yes.
The White City was a young woman in a wedding gown. It was an undiscovered country. A calliope being played for the first time, crisp and raucous. The feeling of falling from a great height. It was all of these things to Tomás, and upon seeing it the next day as part of Eulalia’s cortege, he felt as if he was no longer the same man. He stood transfixed at the Court of Honor. White buildings surrounding a basin of water, silvery statues all around, posed athletically. In the lake floated Columbus’s caravels, having been brought to Chicago from New York City. Tomás could no longer see the cannons, and now the decks teemed with fairgoers, and the ships teetered in the water.
Eulalia was led from one building to the next. In the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, she tried on a glass dress. It swayed like real fabric, and under the electric lights, it glimmered. She ordered one on the spot, and the dressmaker, who wore magnifying lenses over both eyes, took the order with tremendous seriousness. They saw Bach’s clavichord, and rode an elevator up and down three times. Each time, Eulalia clutched her stomach and said, “Do you feel it, Tomás?” and he would nod and say, “Of course, su alteza, of course I do.” The Remington Company exhibited forty different typewriters, and Tomás lingered here longest, laying his fingers along the keys. There were Arabic typewriters, and Chinese ones, too. The Spanish typewriters, with their “ñ’s” were, not surprisingly, his favorites. He smoothed the ribbon of one of the machines, and a salesman was beside him at once.
“What’s your profession, sir?”
Tomás began to say he was a bookseller, then a secretary, stammering so that when he finally said, “I am a writer,” the salesman merely patted his back and moved on to another potential customer.
In the Tiffany exhibit, the salesman drew a heavy black case out for Eulalia. Within were ten different diadems, composed of every gem imaginable. “That one,” Tomás whispered, pointing to a circlet made of aquamarines over Eulalia’s shoulder.
“Aquamarines?” she wondered. “Why those?”
“Like your eyes, princess,” the salesman said, answering before Tomás could. The moment had felt charged with history for Tomás, but how to explain that to Eulalia, who had not heard Amalia’s stories? So he dropped it, agreeing with the salesman. This seemed to disappoint her, the compliment so lacking in imagination.
It was an exhausting day, and when they returned by carriage to the Palmer House, they found Antonio dressed and ready for dinner. He was feeling better, and had even spent some time at the fair.
“It’s spectacular,” Antonio said to Eulalia upon seeing her. “I’ve bought souvenirs. It seemed the thing to do,” he said, a sheepish grin on his face. He had laid them out on the table. There was a brass spittoon, with the words Chicago Columbian World’s Fair on one side. He’d bought a pitcher, etched in gold paint, with an image of the Court of Honor on it. There were cuff links and a hairbrush for Eulalia, three model caravels for their sons, and a miniature Siberian mammoth, too. He’d also bought a stereograph and some pictures to go with it. Eulalia brought these to her eyes and saw a half-naked woman, her arms aloft, and strips of lace frozen above her head. “Danse du ventre,” Antonio said. “From Cairo, that one.” Eulalia put down the stereograph slowly.
“It seems we had very different experiences,” she said. Later, she would learn that Antonio had visited the Midway Plaisance, which was made up of private exhibits with a decidedly Bohemian sensibility. Antonio’s souvenirs stayed on the table in the parlor, untouched by the maids, though the stereograph was often moved and passed from hand to hand, the ladies in particular gasping at the vision within.
While Eulalia and Antonio had dinner and later attended a concert at the exposition, Tomás sought out Sylvester Hartwell. His offices were near the Exposition, and from the street, Tomás could see the Midway that Antonio had visited. A circular contraption spun like a windmill in the distance. It was an enormous revolving wheel with passengers in small cars dangling from each spoke. He was still staring at it in the distance when he reached Hartwell & Company. Tomás held the typed manuscript in his arms. A strong wind whipped off the lake, and at one point, he had to chase the first page down a street, watching in terror as it flipped and soared, and, finally, wrapped itself around the trunk of a maple tree. The page was crumbled, but the manuscript was whole, and this he presented to Sylvester Hartwell in his lush office, with a view of the fair. The original copy, the one in Eulalia’s hand, was safe in Tomás’s room.
“A man named Ferris came up with it,” Mr. Hartwell said, when he caught Tomás looking at the wheel outside the window. “Death trap, is what it is,” the man grumbled. He had a full head of white hair, and a white beard, too. Like his daughter, Eliza Jane, Sylvester Hartwell had the kind of voice that rose above the rest. Here was a man who made himself heard, a man, Tomás thought, who could not be ruled.
“Let’s see it then. Eliza Jane seemed rather enthused,” he held out his hand and took the whole manuscript upon it, weighing it like a piece of meat. He put reading glasses on, and sat in a green leather chair to begin reading.
“Shall I—” Tomás began to say, pointing back toward the door from which he’d entered.
“Wait,” Mr. Hartwell said, a fat finger in the air. It was a crooked finger, bent a bit from arthritis, and yet Tomás thought that such a hand would have once upon a time delivered a tremendous, crippling punch. He looked at his own hands, large and knuckly. How easily had his hands lain upon the keys of the typewriter once. How they had covered the keys almost entirely.
Mr. Hartwell read for nearly an hour, turning pages slowly, like peeling back wrapping paper one intends to save. Every so often, he would make a clearing sound in his throat, or else he would pause and make a note on the margin. A secretary came in after a while with a pot of coffee. This she set down on Mr. Hartwell’s desk, and the man gestured to Tomás, who filled two cups, then drank the bitter stuff without sugar, which was not his habit.
When Mr. Hartwell was done, he leaned back and let the final page float onto his desk, where it slipped off the pile and sat askew. Tomás tamped down the desire to right it. He had been the guardian of the book for so long that he felt an animal desire to protect it, and by extension, her.
“Arrange a meeting with the infanta, son. I would like to speak with her,” Mr. Hartwell said. “There may be risks.”
“She understands the risks,” Tomás said, though he wasn’t sure that was true. Eulalia had joked about leaving the country, abandoning Spain if she had to, but did she mean it?
“I’m sure she does,” Mr. Hartwell said. “Don’t presume to know what’s in my mind, now. Or hers. Don’t ever presume that.”
3
On one side it read 1492 and on the other, 1893. An F and an I, joined by a cross, represented Ferdinand and Isabella. Eulalia turned the silver ring in her hand. Etched inside, and on the back, was the name Carmela. The unassuming ring had sat upon the parlor table among Antonio’s souvenirs for days, but now Eulalia had found it, and she sat with it for a long while in her room, slipping the ring on and off. It was big on her, a size eight when she was a size six, and she wondered if Carmela was much larger than she was, or if Antonio had simply guessed. Earlier that month, when Eulalia had been packing for the trip, she had discovered that one of her diadems had gone missing. It was a colorful piece, made up of diamonds, sapphires, rubies, and emeralds, and had belonged to Pilár. They turned their home over looking for it, and Antonio himself interrogated the servants, one by one, and threatened to fire them all. But the diadem had not appeared. A gossip column later described the “rainbow gems” atop the head of a little-known actress from Andalusia, and Eulalia had guessed what had happened.
That morning, just before she had found the ring inscribed to Carmela, she had had tea with one of her ladies, the Marquesa de Arco, who had brought with her a Spanish newspaper, which had, in small print toward one of the back pages, described the viscounty of Temerens as now belonging to one Carmela Jiménez-Floréz, a noble title being recently arranged for the woman. “He will bankrupt me,” Eulalia had said to the marquesa, who, hedging her bets, could only pat Eulalia’s hand.
