Yes! she wanted to scream. Yes! For that’s what you are. But her lips managed to say words he would hopefully want to hear:
“It doesn’t matter what someone like me thinks, señor.”
She took the glass almost hastily, hoping he wouldn’t notice her shaking hand. He filled another glass for himself and gulped the brandy. Mercedes still hadn’t touched hers. How could she drink with the glass in her throat? He knows. . . .
“I want you to bring me some more liquor. From the barn.” He pushed the cork into the bottle. “Please.”
“Yes, señor.” Mercedes put her untouched glass on the table. “Good night, señor.”
She got up.
“Mercedes . . .”
Poor mouse. The cat always gives it that moment of hope.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Señor?” She turned around slowly, a fly caught in amber, the tree’s sap hardening around her.
He opened the top drawer of his table.
“The key.” He held it up. “I do have the only copy, don’t I?”
Terror stiffened her neck, but she managed to nod. “Yes, señor.”
He got up from his chair, weighing the key in his hand as he walked around the table.
“You know, there’s an odd detail that’s been bothering me. Maybe it’s not important but—” He stopped right in front of her. “The day the rebels broke into the barn with all those grenades and explosives . . . the lock itself wasn’t forced.”
Answering his glance took all her courage. All of it.
“As I said.” His eyes were as black as the muzzle of the pistol he had shot Ferreira with. “It’s probably not important.”
He clasped his fingers around hers when he handed her the key, his fingers that had broken Tarta’s with a hammer.
“Be very careful.”
The tomcat clearly didn’t want the game to end yet. Why else would he warn her? Yes. He wanted to watch her run and shoot her in the back like Ferreira. Or chase her like a deer after he stirred her out of the thicket she was hiding in.
Vidal loosened his grip, his eyes still on her.
“Good night, señor.” She turned once again, surprised her legs were obeying her. Walk, Mercedes!
Vidal watched her leave. All tomcats enjoy letting the mice go. For a while. After they felt their claws.
He walked over to the phonograph and dropped the needle onto the record. One could have danced to the music. Appropriate, as he’d just initiated another deadly waltz and this time the prey was especially beautiful.
Vidal approached the cradle and looked down at his son.
The woman who had given birth to him had been beautiful too, but Mercedes was stronger. Which meant it would be so much more enjoyable to break her, much more enjoyable for sure than to torture that stutterer or to shoot that noble idiot of a doctor. And he had a son now. Someone to teach what life was about.
He would teach him its cruel dance. Step by step.
32
It’s Nothing
Though Mercedes yearned to run, she walked down the stairs, worried her shaking knees would make her stumble. The capitán didn’t follow her, not yet, but there wouldn’t be much more time.
She pushed aside the tile in the kitchen floor and took out the latest batch of letters she’d been entrusted to deliver to the men in the woods, letters from mothers, fathers, sisters, lovers. A woman’s voice drifted down from Vidal’s room singing softly of love and its torment, as if he were teasing her with his music, each note the tip of a knife pressed against her throat.
He knows.
Yes, he did, and she would end up like Ferreira with her face in the mud—though Vidal would probably prefer her to die on her back like Ofelia’s mother, while giving him another son. For a moment Mercedes just stood in the dark kitchen, held by the song drifting down from above, as if his fingers were still grabbing her hand, those murderous bloodstained fingers.
Go, Mercedes. He can’t tie you down with a song. No. But she couldn’t leave the girl. Not without saying goodbye.
Ofelia was fast asleep, although the night was still young, when Mercedes slipped into the attic room, the night of her mother’s funeral. Grief exhausts the heart. Vidal’s music drowned the treacherous creak of the door and the sound of Mercedes’s steps as she approached the bed. Most times it seemed as if the old mill was on the soldiers’ side, but sometimes Mercedes found the old house to be a friend.
“Ofelia! Ofelia, wake up!”
Mercedes grabbed the girl’s shoulder without taking her eyes off the door. “Ofelia!” Please wake, please. . . .
The girl’s eyelids, heavy with sleep, finally opened. Mercedes bent over her, grabbing her hand.
“I am leaving, Ofelia.”
The eyes opened wide, such beautiful eyes, as beautiful as her mother’s, but beauty was a dangerous gift in this world.
“Where are you going?”
“I can’t tell you. I can’t.”
Mercedes cast another gaze at the door. The music was still seeping in, as if Vidal was weaving his web into the night.
“Take me with you!” Ofelia grabbed her arm. “Please!”
“No, no!” Mercedes whispered, caressing the frightened face. “I can’t!”
The girl threw her arms around Mercedes’s neck. She was too young to be alone in the world, far too young.
Mercedes kissed her hair, as raven-black as her own, and held her in her arms the way she’d once wished to hold a daughter of her own. “I can’t, my child! I will come back for you, I promise.”
But Ofelia wouldn’t let go. She held on so tightly Mercedes could feel her heartbeat.
“Take me with you!” she begged. “Take me with you!” Over and over again.
How could anyone say no in the face of such loneliness?
Stumbling through the night, they followed the brook, shuddering under another pour of freezing rain. The old umbrella Mercedes had grabbed barely sheltered them from it. One time she believed she heard Ferreira’s footsteps behind her and had to remind herself that he was dead, like Tarta and so many others. Dead. Did the word become more or less real with every time one had to attach it to a loved one?
“Wait!” Mercedes stopped, her arm firmly around Ofelia’s shoulders.
She thought she could hear a horse snorting, but when she listened keenly into the night, all she could hear was the rain drumming against the trees and dripping from the leaves above them.
“It’s nothing!” she whispered, pressing Ofelia to her side. “Don’t worry. Let’s go.”
But the game was over.
As Mercedes turned, lifting the umbrella, she gazed into Vidal’s face. Garces stood behind him and at least twenty more of his soldiers. How had she not heard them? The night is always on the hunters’ side.
“Mercedes.” Vidal turned her name into a chain around her neck. He let his gaze wander across her face, so stiff with terror, and down to the girl.
“Ofelia.”
He didn’t try to veil his hatred.
He grabbed the girl’s arm and left Mercedes to Garces.
They will kill her. That was all Ofelia could think, while the Wolf dragged her back to the mill, through the forest, over the mud-covered yard, into the house, where her mother had died. They will kill Mercedes like they killed my mother.