“To obey . . .” Ferreira chose his words carefully. “. . . just like that, for the sake of obeying, without questioning . . . that’s something only people like you can do, Capitán.”
He turned to pick up his bag, then stepped out into the rain. Of course, he knew what was going to happen, but why not take the moment, the moment of being finally free of fear? He felt the cold rain on his face as he walked away from the barn. Such precious steps, so free, so at peace with himself.
He cast a glance over his shoulder, just when Vidal came out of the barn, with the long-determined stride of the hunter. Ferreira didn’t turn or stop when Vidal drew his pistol. He kept on walking. When the bullet hit him in the back, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, though he knew the fog filling them was the breath of Death. Two more steps. Then his legs gave way and there was only the mud and the fading rain. Ferreira could hear himself breathing. He was cold. Very cold. No memory came to him, no soothing words. For some inexplicable reason the only thing he noticed was a spider hidden between the stones of a wall a few feet away. The little animal appeared to his eyes, like a miracle: He could see every joint, every follicle, and every chitinous bump. The spider’s architecture, its grace, its beauty, and its hunger all seemed to blend into a single thing: the last thing alive. Ferreira inhaled and drank muddy water. He tried to cough it out, but mid-cough his heart stopped.
One clean shot.
Vidal approached the outstretched body and crushed the glasses next to it under his boot. He still didn’t understand why the fool hadn’t obeyed him, but he was strangely relieved the good doctor was dead and he would never have to look into those soft and far-too-thoughtful eyes again.
“Capitán!”
Two of the maids were standing in front of the barn, their faces pale with worry. Vidal pushed the pistol back into his holster. He could barely make sense of what they were saying. His wife was not well, that’s what he finally picked up from their frightened nattering—and that his son was on the way, while the doctor who had been supposed to help with his birth was lying dead in the mud behind him.
When the Faun Fell in Love
There is a forest in Galicia so ancient some of the trees remember a time when animals took the shape of men and men grew wings and fur. Some men, the trees whisper, even became oak and beech and laurel and drove their roots so deeply into the ground they forgot their names. There is one fig tree especially whose story the others like to tell when the wind makes their leaves murmur. It grows on a hill at the heart of the forest. One can spot it easily, as the two main branches bend like the horns of a goat and the trunk is split, as if the tree gave birth to something growing under its bark.
Yes! the forest whispers. That’s why the trunk is split open like a wound. This tree did give birth, for it was once a woman who danced and sang under my canopy. She picked my berries and braided her hair with my flowers. But one day she met a Faun who liked to play his flute under my trees in the moonlight. He’d fashioned the flute from the finger bones of an ogre and his tune sang of the dark underground kingdom he came from, so different from the light the woman carried inside.
All this is true, and she fell in love with the Faun nevertheless, with a love as deep and inescapable as a well, and the Faun loved her back. When he finally asked her to come with him to his underground world, however, she dreaded the thought of spending the rest of her life without ever seeing the stars or feeling the wind on her skin. So she decided to stay and watched him leave. However, the love she felt filled her with such longing, her feet grew roots to follow her beloved underground, while her arms reached for the sky and the stars she’d chosen over him.
Oh, the heartache she felt. It made her soft skin turn to bark. Her sighs became the rustling of the wind in a thousand leaves and, when the Faun came back one moonlit night to play his flute for her, all he found was a tree whispering the name he had never told anyone but her.
The Faun sat down between the tree’s roots and felt his own tears like dew on his face. The branches he sat under showered him with flowers, but his lover couldn’t throw her arms around him or kiss his lips anymore. He felt such a pain in his wild and fearless heart that when he caressed the tree his own skin—once covered with silken fur—became as rough and wooden as the bark of his lost love.
The Faun sat under the tree all night until the sun rose and drove him away. Its bright light had never become him and when he had returned to the dark womb of the earth, the tree bent her branches deeper and deeper in sadness until they resembled her lover’s horned head.
Eight months later, on a full moon night, the trunk of the tree split with a soft moan and a child stepped out. It was a boy, graced with the beauty of his mother, while the horns in his green hair and the hooves on his slender legs gave away his father. He pranced and danced down the hill like his mother had once danced under the trees, and he made himself a flute from bird bones to fill the forest with a song that sang of love and loss.
Deep underground, where he was instructing a princess in the tasks of her parents’ court, the Faun heard the flute’s music. He excused himself and rushed through secret passageways known only to him to the Upper Kingdom. But when he arrived, the sound of the flute was nowhere to be heard, and all he found was a track of small hooves on the wet moss, washed away by the rain after a few dancing steps.
30
Don’t Hurt Her
Her mother was screaming. Ofelia was sitting on a bench a maid had put outside her mother’s bedroom and she could hear it through the wall. The Wolf was sitting next to her, just an arm’s length away, staring blindly at the wooden railing through which she had sometimes watched the maids in the hall below. Did he also, Ofelia wondered, feel the urge to throw himself over the handrail each time her mother let out another tormented scream? To shatter the aching heart on the stone tiles just to find relief from all the fear and pain? But life is even stronger than Death, so Ofelia stayed on the bench next to the Wolf who had lured her mother to this house to scream and bleed.
Ofelia was sure everything would have been all right if her mother hadn’t thrown the mandrake into the fire. Or if Ofelia had only hidden it better. And if she’d resisted the grapes of the Pale Man. . . .
Another scream.
Did she wish her brother to die for hurting her mother so badly? She couldn’t say. She wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Her heart was so numb from all that fear and pain. Did her brother make their mother scream because he was as cruel as his father? No. He probably couldn’t help it. After all, no one had asked him whether he wished to be born. Maybe he’d been happy where he was before. Maybe it was the same world the Faun claimed she came from. In that case she’d have to tell her brother how hard it would be to get back to it.
One of the maids rushed by with a jug of water.
Vidal followed her with his eyes.
His son. He would lose his son. He didn’t care about the woman screaming in that room. A tailor’s wife . . . wrong choices throughout all his life. He should have known she was too weak to keep his son safe. He needed that son.
In the bedroom behind him Mercedes was fighting Death. Along with the medic and the other maids.
Everything was red with blood: the sheets of the bed, the hands of the medic who was used to the screams of injured soldiers but not to the pain life caused coming into this world and the white nightgown Ofelia’s father had sown for Carmen.