I am Marie Charlotte of Belgium, Empress of Mexico and of America. I am Marie Charlotte Amélie, cousin of the Queen of England, Grand Magister of the Cross of Saint Charles, and Vicereine of the Lombard-Veneto Provinces, which Austria’s clemency and mercy has subsumed under the two-headed eagle of the House of Habsburg. I am Marie Charlotte Amélie Victoria, daughter of Leopold, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and King of Belgium, known as “The Nestor of Europe,” and who would take me onto his lap, caress my chestnut tresses, and call me the little sylph of the Castle of Laeken. I am Marie Charlotte Amélie Victoria Clementine, daughter of Louise Marie of Orleans, the saintly queen with the blue eyes and the Bourbon nose who died of consumption and of the sorrow caused by the exile and death of Louis Philippe, my grandfather, who, as the King of France, showered me with chestnuts and covered my face with kisses in the Tuileries Gardens. I am Marie Charlotte Amélie Victoria Clementine Leopoldine, niece of Prince Joinville and cousin of the Count of Paris; I am sister of the Duke of Brabant, who became King of Belgium and colonized the Congo, and of the Count of Flanders in whose arms I learned to dance, at the age of ten, under the shade of flowering hawthorns. I am Charlotte Amélie, wife of Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, Count of Habsburg, Prince of Lorraine, Emperor of Mexico and King of the World, who was born in the Imperial Palace of Schönbrunn, and who was the first descendant of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella to cross the ocean and tread on American soil; who built a white palace for me with a view of the sea on the shores of the Adriatic; who later took me to Mexico to live in a gray castle with a view of the valley and the snowcapped volcanoes and who, on a June morning, many years ago, was executed in the city of Querétaro. I am Charlotte Amélie, Regent of Anáhuac, Queen of Nicaragua, Baroness of Matto Grosso, and Princess of Chichén Itzá. I am Charlotte Amélie of Belgium, Empress of Mexico and America. I am eighty-six years old and for sixty years now I’ve quenched my lunatic thirst with water from Roman fountains.

Today the messenger arrived with news from the Empire. He came bearing memories and dreams on a caravelle whose sails were swelled by a single, luminous gust of wind, teeming with parrots. He brought me a handful of sand from the Isle of Sacrifices, a pair of chamois gloves, and an enormous cask made of precious woods, brimming with hot and foaming chocolate in which I shall bathe every single day for the rest of my life, until my Bourbon-princess skin, my crazed octogenarian skin, my white, Alençon-and-Brussels lace skin, my skin snowy as the magnolias in the Gardens of Miramare, Maximilian, my skin cracked by the centuries and the storms and the fall of dynasties, until my white, Memling-angel skin, my Béguinage-bride skin, disintegrates, and I grow a new skin, dark and aromatic as the chocolate from Soconusco, fragrant as vanilla from Papantla, that will cover my whole body, Maximilian, from my dark brow to the tip of my bare, perfumed, Mexican Indian toes, the toes of a dark Madonna, of an Empress of America.

My dear Max, the messenger also brought me a locket with some hairs from your golden beard, your beard that flowed and fluttered like an enormous golden butterfly on your breast, with its gleaming Aztec Eagle, as you rode through the Apam plains in clouds of glory and dust, clad in your charro suit, a sterling-silver trimmed sombrero on your head. They say, Maximilian, that while your body was still warm and your plaster of paris death mask was still wet, those barbarians, those savages yanked out your whiskers and your locks to sell in pieces for a few piastres. Who would have thought, Maximilian, that you would suffer the same fate as your father, if indeed your father was that unfortunate Duke of Reichstadt whom nothing and no one could save from an early grave—not the muriatic acid baths, not the donkey’s milk, not the love of your mother, the Archduchess Sophia? Barely a few seconds after he had died in the very same Schönbrunn Palace where you’d just been born, his golden ringlets were all shorn to become pious souveniers for his people. He was spared, but you were not, Maximilian, from having his heart chopped up in little pieces and sold for a few coins. The messenger told me everything. He heard it from Tüdös, your loyal Hungarian chef, who followed you to the wall and extinguished the flames that had engulfed your waistcoat after the coup de grâce. The messenger brought me a cedar chest from Prince and Princess Salm-Salm, containing a zinc box that held a rosewood box where I found, Maximilian, a piece of your heart next to the bullet that ended your life and your empire, on Las Campanas Hill. All day I clutch that box in my hands so tightly that no one will ever take it from me. My ladies-in-waiting have to spoon-feed me because I never let go of it. Countess d’Hulst feeds me milk as though she were nursing a baby, as though I were still Papa Leopold’s little angel, the tiny chestnut-haired Bonapartist, because I cannot let you go.

And that is the only reason, I swear to you, Maximilian, that they say I am mad. That is why they call me The Madwoman of Miramare, of Terveuren, of Bouchout. If they tell you that I was crazy when I left Mexico and that I was crazy when I crossed the ocean, locked up in my stateroom on the Impératrice Eugénie after ordering the captain to lower the French flag and to raise the Mexican Imperial tricolor; if they tell you that I never left my stateroom because I’d gone mad, and that I was mad not because they gave me potions in Yucatán nor because I knew that both Napoleon and the Pope would refuse to help us, would abandon us to our fate, to our miserable fate in Mexico, but that I was mad and desperate, lost because I was carrying a son who was not yours but Colonel Van der Smissen’s in my womb; if they tell you all of those things, tell them it isn’t true, that you always were, and always will be, the love of my life. Tell them that, if I am mad, it is from hunger and thirst, that I have been mad since that fateful day in the Palace of St. Cloud when the devil himself, Napoleon III, and his wife Eugenia de Montijo, offered me a glass of cold orangeade, and I knew—everybody knew—that it was poisoned, because it wasn’t enough for them to betray us, they wanted to erase us from the face of the Earth, to poison us. And it wasn’t only Little Napoleon and that Montijo woman who wanted to kill us, but also our closest friends, our own servants—you won’t believe it Max—even Blasio. Beware of the indelible pencil he uses to write the letters that you dictate to him on the way to Cuernavaca, of his saliva, of the sulfurous water of the Cuautla Springs, of the pulque with champagne. Beware, Max, just as I’ve had to beware of everyone, even of Señora Neri del Barrio who rode along with me to the Trevi Fountain every morning in my black carriage because I made up my mind to only drink water from the fountains of Rome, and only using the Murano glass that His Holiness Pius IX gave me when I paid him a surprise visit, without asking for an audience, while he ate his breakfast, and he realized that I was starving and dying of thirst. Would the Empress of Mexico like some grapes? Would she care for a buttered croissant? Maybe some milk, Doña Carlota, fresh from a nanny goat? But the only thing I wanted was to wet my fingers in that scalding and foamy liquid that I knew would burn and tan my skin, so I stuck my fingers on His Holiness’s hot chocolate. I licked them, Max. I don’t know what I would have done, if I hadn’t gone to the market myself for the nuts and the oranges I would take to the Albergo di Roma. I chose them all myself; I wiped them clean with the black lace mantilla that Eugenia had given me; I scrutinized their shells and peels, I cracked them and peeled them; I devoured them with some roasted chestnuts that I bought on the Appian Way and I can’t imagine how I would have managed without Madame Kuchacsevich and the cat, who tasted all my food before I ate it, or my chambermaid, Matilde Doblinger, who procured a coal stove and brought me some chickens to the imperial suite so that I could eat only those eggs that I had seen lain with my own eyes.

In those days, Maximilian, when I was the little angel, the sylph of Laeken, who slid down the wooden banister of the palace stairs and played at keeping quiet forever in the gardens while my brother, the Count of Flanders, stood on his head and made faces at me to make me laugh, and my other brother, the Duke of Brabant, made up imaginary cities and told me about famous shipwrecks; in those days, when my father took me out to dinner, just the two of us, and when he crowned me with roses and showered me with presents, I used to visit my grandmother Marie Amélie every year, who lived in Claremont. Do you remember Max, that she told us not to go to Mexico because we would be murdered there? I met my cousins Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in Windsor Castle on one of those trips. In those days, my dear Max, when I was a chestnut-haired child and my bed was a white, warm, downy nest of snow in which my mother Louise Marie would moisten her lips, my cousin Victoria, who marveled that I could recite the name of every English king from Harold to her uncle William IV, rewarded my studiousness with a dollhouse. When it arrived in Brussels, my father Leopich, as I used to call him, summoned me to see it, sat me on his lap, caressed my forehead, and, as he had once done with his niece Victoria, Queen of England, urged me to keep my conscience as immaculate as I would keep my doll house, every night of every day. From that time forward, Maximilian, not a night goes by that I don’t put my house and my conscience in order. I air out the livery of my miniature footmen and I forgive you for having cried in Madeira over the death of a girlfriend whom you loved more than me. I wash the thousand minuscule dishes of Sèvres china in a basin, and I forgive you for leaving me alone in my imperial bed in Puebla, under its tulle and brocade canopy, while you would lie on a field cot masturbating as you dreamed about the little Countess von Linden. I polish the miniature silver platters, I clean my Lilliputian guards’ halberds, I wash the tiny clusters of tiny crystal grapes and I forgive you for making love to a gardener’s wife in the shade of a bougainvillea in Borda Gardens. Later, I use a broom, small as a thumb, to sweep castle rugs the size of handkerchiefs. I dust the paintings and I empty a spittoon like a thimble, and the miniature ashtrays, and as I forgive all that you did, I forgive all of our enemies and I forgive Mexico.

How can I not forgive Mexico, Maximilian, when every single day I dust your crown, I polish the insignia of the Order of Guadalupe with ashes, I rub milk on my Biedemeyer piano keys, on which I play the Mexican Imperial Anthem every afternoon? Every day I go down the castle staircase and kneel at the banks of the moat to launder the Mexican Imperial Flag in its waters. I rinse it, I wring it out, and I hang it out to dry from the highest castle tower, and I iron it, Maximilian, I caress it, I fold it and put it away, vowing to take it out again on the morrow so that it may wave before all of Europe, from Ostende to the Carpathians, from Tyrol to Transylvania. And only after that’s done, after my house and my conscience are in order, do I undress and put on my minuscule nightdress, say my tiny prayers, and retire to my grand miniature bed. Only then do I put your heart under a pillow the size of a pincushion embroidered with thistles, and listen to its beating, as I hear the roar of the cannons from the Citadel in Trieste and from the Rock of Gibraltar when they salute the Novara, and as I listen to the clackety-clack of the train from Veracruz to Loma Alta, and I hear the music of the Domine Salvum fac Imperatorem. Again, as I hear the gunshots from Querétaro, and I dream, I would like to dream, Maximilian, that we never left Miramare and Lacroma, that we never went to Mexico, that we stayed here, where we grew old, and raised many children and grandchildren, that you stayed here in your blue office decorated with anchors and astrolabes, writing poems about your future journeys on the yacht Ondina through the Greek Islands and along the coast of Turkey and dreaming about Leonardo’s mechanical bird, and that I stayed behind forever adoring you and drinking the blue of the Adriatic with my eyes. But my own screams woke me up at that point, and I felt so ravenous, Max, you can’t imagine, after centuries of only eating anguish and anxiety, and so parched, Max, after centuries of only drinking my own tears, that I devoured your heart and drank your blood. But your heart and blood, my dear, my cherished Max, had both been poisoned.

What a coincidence that the rain we ran into on the way from Paris to Trieste and from Trieste to Rome, Maximilian, had been as heavy as or even heavier than the rain on the night that we arrived in Córdoba. Do you remember that we rode in a government carriage because our imperial coach had lost a wheel on Chiquihuite Hill and we were mud-spattered from head to toe, thanking God that we had left the pestilent jungles of Veracruz behind, its vultures and yellow fever? Do you remember how, in one or two more days, from the foothills of Mount Popocatépetl, we were to behold the same vast transparent valley and city of a thousand palaces built of red lava from the volcanoes and the yellow sands of the swamps that Hernán Cortés and Baron von Humboldt had seen before us? It rained cats and dogs in Savoy and again, as my train and entourage crossed Mount Cenis, all the way through Maribor, Mantua, Reggio, and all those cities we passed through because of the cholera epidemic in Venice, where Italians and Garibaldi’s Red Shirts greeted me with cheers and tears, and it rained when your friend, Admiral Tegetthoff, the same one who brought your body from Veracruz to Trieste on board the Novara, in a funeral chapel surmounted by an angel’s wings, ordered the Austrian Fleet to parade before me in the same formation he had used in the Battle of Lissa that won him his fame. I sent a message to you in Mexico, Max, telling you that if Plus Ultra had been the motto and battle cry of your ancestors, it had to be yours as well and that, just as Charles V had pointed the way beyond the Pillars of Hercules, you would have to keep on going. “Thou shalt not abdicate,” I told you, “Thou shalt not abdicate.” That is the eleventh commandment that God etched with fire in the heart of those rulers to whom he granted the Divine Right, that unrenounceable right, to rule to govern any nation. “Thou shalt not abdicate,” I told you a thousand times when you were in Orizaba strolling with Bilimek, as he explained to you how to make soap with castor seeds, and when you played hide-and-seek with Dr. Basch and with General Castelnau in the coffee groves, and amid the white flowers of the manioc plant. I wrote you, Maximilian. Tell me, did you get my letters? I told them to tell you, “Thou shalt not abdicate”—did they do it?—when you were at the Xonaca Plantation and when you returned to Mexico City, and when you went to Querétaro, yes, even if you have to eat cat and horse meat with your generals Mejía and Miramón, and with your Prince Salm-Salm who threw bread crumbs to your guards. And you, my dear Max, forever a hopeless case, who gave final instructions to Dr. Szänger on the embalming of your body, and dictated to Blasio the changes that you wanted to make in the Court Ceremonial, because you never believed that you would really be assassinated, Max, as indeed you were.

So that, during those journeys from Paris to Trieste and from Trieste to Rome, and back again to Trieste, until we arrived at Miramare, all I needed was to stretch out my cupped hands from the carriage to catch the only drink that I could be sure wasn’t poisoned—rainwater—as I do now from the castle balconies. There, in the basin that overflows with crystal-clear water, a white dove is perching on its rim. When the messenger comes disguised as a white dove and he brings me the words of the song by Concha Méndez from Cuba, there, in my cupped hands as at the bottom of a patera, I see your face and I drink it sip by sip, your dead face, eyes shut and the weight of all the dust of all the time that’s passed since the year of your execution on their lids. That was the same year the waltz of the Blue Danube was born. How I would love to have danced it with you. I see your dead face, your eyes staring wide, those black glass beads that they put in your empty sockets in Querétaro. Those glass eyes look at me from far away, from the foot of a hill covered with dirt and cacti. They look at me in wonder as though to ask why and how it is that so many things have happened that you never heard of before.

Did anyone tell you, Maximilian, that the telephone was invented? Or neon gas? And the automobile, Max? Did they tell you that your brother Franz Joseph, who regarded himself as the last ruler of the old school, only rode in a motor car once in his life? Did you know, Maximilian, that in your beloved Vienna, you can never again see the phaetons and the Daumont-style coaches, the chaises, and the landaus, not even those great stud horses, their manes and tails braided in gold, because the streets are crowded with automobiles, Max? Did you know all that? And that the phonograph was invented so that you and I could go on a picnic, just the two of us, with the “Blue Danube” playing in the background just for you and me on the banks of Chapultepec Lake, no musicians lurking in the treetops? So that we could dance under the golden, violet shade of the living, trembling arches of the Avenue of the Poets, with no orchestra hiding under the bridge of the lake, Maximilian? Did you know that nothing remains of the Dianabad, that Viennese ballroom where the “Blue Danube” was played for the first time? That it was destroyed by bombs just like the Palace of St. Cloud was, and that nothing remains of Mignard’s Olympus, the ceiling mural in the Mars Ballroom where Napoleon and Eugénie offered me a glass of orangeade, the same ballroom where Cambacéres offered the Crown of France to Napoleon Bonaparte? And that all the furnishings and carpets, the colossal mantelpiece crowned by a Gobelin tapestry, are gone forever, leaving only ruins and memories? That nothing remains of the staircase at the foot of which Loulou—the little Imperial Prince—greeted me, wearing the decorations of the Mexican Eagle and of the Arab equestrian guards around his neck? And that only dust and lizards are left in place of the St. Cloud Pond and of the boats that the Emperor of Cochin China gave to Loulou?

When I remember all that, Maximilian, it seems unreal that all these years have gone by, that all those days we thought would never arrive have already come and gone. Because, did you know, Maximilian, every day comes—sooner or later—whether or not you believe in it or want it to happen? Every day comes, no matter how distant it may seem. The day you turn eighteen and go to your first ball, the day you marry and are happy. And when your last day comes, the day you die, all of your days become one. And then it turns out that you, that all of us, have always been dead. And—how it hurts me to tell you, Maximilian—it turns out that even when your sister-in-law Sisi was a child who danced in the squares of Bavaria as her father played the violin dressed in gypsy’s clothes, she had already been stabbed by the stiletto that a madman plunged into the Empress Elisabeth’s breast at the banks of Leman Lake fifty years later. And it turns out, how awful that you have to hear this, that even when your father, the Eaglet, was a child imagining the Battle of Austerlitz and the invasion of Mantua with such amazement while eating his truffled turkey and carrots, his mouth was already full of the blood that would drain away the life of the Duke of Reichstadt in a dark and icy chamber of the Schönbrunn Palace.