Mercedes turned away from the bed.
Blood . . . it seemed to be everywhere. She had heard by this time about Ferreira lying in the mud, his blood mixing with the rain, and about Tarta, whose blood was dyeing the straw on the barn floor. Mercedes went to close the bedroom door even though she knew the girl sitting outside could hear the screams through the wall. How she pitied her. The child’s pain hurt her more than the mother’s.
Another scream.
Ofelia felt it like a knife cutting a slice off her heart. Another maid rushed out into the corridor holding heaps of blood-soaked linen. And then . . . the screams and moans weakened . . . faded . . . and stopped.
A terrible silence seeped through the wall and filled the corridor.
Then the shrill voice of a crying baby pierced it.
The medic stepped out of the room, his apron and hands covered with blood. The Wolf got up.
“Your wife is dead.”
The medic lowered his voice, but Ofelia heard him.
The world was as hard and comfortless as the bench she was sitting on, as barren as the whitewashed walls around her. She felt her tears like cold rain on her face. She hadn’t understood until now what it meant to be alone, utterly and completely alone.
Ofelia somehow managed to rise to her feet and slowly walked over the wooden floorboards, worn smooth from the steps of long-ago people, toward her mother’s room where the baby was crying. His screams sounded like the squeals of the mandrake. They did. Maybe magic existed after all. For a moment Ofelia even thought that her brother was calling her name, but then she saw the empty face of her mother. Her opaque eyes, dull as an old mirror.
No, there was no magic in the world.
They buried Carmen the next day, right behind the mill. It was a colorless morning and as she stood by the grave Ofelia felt as if she’d never had a mother. Or that maybe she had just walked away into the forest. Ofelia couldn’t imagine her in that plain coffin, so hastily built from a few planks of wood by a carpenter the Wolf had summoned from one of the nearby villages.
The priest was a small old man. He looked as if Death would get him next.
“Because the essence of His forgiveness lies in his words and in His mystery . . .”
Ofelia heard the words, but they didn’t make sense. She was alone, all alone, though Mercedes was standing behind her and she now had a brother. The Wolf held him in his arms. To give him a son . . . that was all her mother had been needed for.
The priest kept on talking, and Ofelia stared at the hole the soldiers had dug in the muddy ground. Maybe this had always been what she and her mother’d come to the mill for: to find this grave, to meet once again with Death. There was no place one could escape her. Death ruled everywhere. When had her mother known, Ofelia wondered, she would never leave this place?
“Because God sends us a message, it is our task to decipher it.”
The priest’s words sounded as much a judgment as the words the Faun had yelled at her in his rage. Yes, her mother had been judged as well. Ofelia couldn’t get rid of that thought as she watched her brother sleeping in his father’s arms. She didn’t want to look at them. They had killed her mother.
“The grave takes in only a hollow and senseless shell. Far away now is the soul in its eternal glory . . .”
Ofelia didn’t want her mother’s soul to be far away. But when she went back to her mother’s bedroom, she couldn’t find her there. Far, far away . . .
Some of her fairy-tale books were still on the bedside table as if nothing had changed—and as if she still had a mother.
Because it is in pain . . . the priest’s voice whispered in her head . . . that we find the meaning of life and the state of grace that we lose when we are born. The bottle with the drops Dr. Ferreira had given her mother to help her sleep was on the bedside table. Ofelia held it up to the window, letting the amber liquid catch what little morning light there was.
God in His infinite wisdom puts the solution in our hands.
Ofelia put the bottle into the suitcase Mercedes had already packed with her mother’s few clothes, and picked up her books. There was another suitcase on the table where her mother would have her tea, and underneath the window stood the wheelchair.
Because it is only in His physical absence that the place He occupies in our souls is reaffirmed.
While Ofelia was staring at the empty chair, two ravens flew past the window, so beautiful, so free. Where had her mother gone? Was she with her father now? Would he forgive her that she’d died giving birth to another man’s child?
Ofelia turned her back to the window.
No. There was no God. There was no magic.
There was only Death.
31
The Cat and the Mouse
The night had come, wrapping the last remains of the day in black funeral clothes. Mercedes was in Vidal’s room, holding his baby, the motherless baby, wishing the boy to be fatherless too, wishing him to never meet the man who was leaning over his table, unharmed and unmoved by his wife’s death. Mercedes had never known her own father, but looking at this one she considered herself lucky. What kind of man would his son become growing up in such darkness?
She gently put the boy back into the cradle and covered him with a blanket. His father was holding one of the phonograph records he played all day and well into the night. Mercedes heard the music even in her dreams by now. His hands were so gentle with the records that one could almost make oneself believe he’d used a different pair of hands to break Tarta’s bones and shoot the doctor in the back. She missed Ferreira. He had been the only one at the mill whom she could trust.
“You knew Dr. Ferreira pretty well, didn’t you, Mercedes?”
Vidal wiped the record with the sleeve of his uniform, the uniform she’d scrubbed for hours to get the blood out.
Don’t show any fear, Mercedes.
“We all knew him, señor. Everyone around here.”
He just looked at her. Oh, how well she knew his games by now. Don’t show any fear, Mercedes.
“The stutterer spoke of an informer,” he said as casually as if they were discussing what to eat for dinner. “Here . . . at the mill. Can you imagine?” His arm brushed hers as he walked past her. “Right under my nose.”
Mercedes stared at her feet. She couldn’t feel them. Fear made them numb. Vidal put the record on the phonograph.
Don’t look at him. He’ll see—he’ll know!
Panic constricted her throat and as hard as she tried to swallow, her fear was like a rope strangling her. Behind her the baby began to softly complain, almost muffled, as if he didn’t yet know how to cry.
“Mercedes, please.” Vidal waved her to the chair in front of his table.
It was so hard to make her feet move, although she knew any glimpse of hesitation would betray her. Maybe it was too late anyway. Maybe Tarta had given them all away. Poor, broken Tarta.
“What must you think of me?” Vidal filled a glass with brandy he kept in his bottom drawer. The tomcat was playing with the mouse; Mercedes had known him far too long to have any illusions about the outcome of this game. Fear filled her throat with broken glass as she sat down sideways, so she didn’t have to face Vidal. And to keep the illusion that she could jump up and run.
“You must think I’m a monster.” He held out the glass to her.