Vlad

Chapter 10

I made it home just before one o’clock in the afternoon. At my house in the El Pedregal neighborhood of San Ángel, our maid, Candelaria, welcomed me in great distress.

“Oh, Señor! I was terrified! That was the first time nobody came home at night! I was all alone.”

What? Had my wife not returned? Where had our daughter gone?

I telephoned Mrs. Alcayaga.

“How are you, Yves? Yes, Magdalena went to school with Chepina very early this morning. No, nothing to worry about. She’s such a tidy little girl and cuter than a button. I ironed her clothes myself while she took a shower. At the school, I explained that Magdita wouldn’t be in uniform today because she wound up sleeping over the night before. Okay, see ya, bye.”

I phoned Asunción’s office. “No,” her secretary said, “she hasn’t been here since yesterday. Is something the matter?”

I showered, shaved, and changed my clothes.

“Don’t you want your chilaquiles, Señor?” asked Candelaria. “Your coffee?”

“Thanks, Candelaria, but I’m in a big hurry. If my wife shows up, tell her to stay put and wait for me.”

I looked around the living room out of the unbreakable habit of checking that everything was in order before going out. We notice nothing when everything is in its place. We feel at ease when we go out. Nothing is out of place; habit reassures us. .

There were no flowers in the house. The bouquets habitually arranged with such care and joy by Asunción, in the vestibule, in the living and dining rooms, visible from where I stood about to go out, were not there. There were no flowers in the house.

So I asked, “Candelaria, why aren’t there any flowers?”

The maid’s face looked grave. Her eyes staunched a reproach.

“The Señora threw them in the trash, Señor. Before going out yesterday, she said, ‘They’re all dried out, I forgot to put them in water. Throw them out already. .’ ”

The crystalline afternoon surprised me. Our valley of sickly haze, once a place of such clear air, had recovered its high visibility and its gorgeous cumulus clouds. This scene restored the mettle that the recent series of unsettling and strange events had snatched away from me.

I drove fast but carefully. Despite everything that had happened, my good habits came back to me, and those habits reinforced my reason. I longed for the city as it used to be, back when the capital was small, safe, walkable, breathable, crowned with awe-inspiring clouds, and encircled by mountains cut out with scissors. .

Soon, I was disconcerted again.

“No,” the school principal said, “Magdalena is absent today.”

“But her classmates, her little friends, can I speak with them, with Chepina?”

No, the girls had not seen Magdalena at any party yesterday.

“At your party, Chepina.”

“There was no party, sir.”

“It was your birthday.”

“No, sir, my saint’s day falls on the day of the Virgin.”

“Of the Assumption, yesterday?”

“No sir, the Feast of the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, that’s my saint’s day, but that’s still a long way off.”

The girl looked at me with impatience. I had come during her class’s recess and was stealing precious minutes of her free time. Her baffled friends stared at Chepina.

I called Chepina’s mother right away. I complained bitterly. Why had she lied to me?

“Please,” she said in a tremulous voice, “don’t ask me anything. Please, Mr. Navarro, I am begging for my life.”

“What about my daughter’s life? My daughter?” I demanded, practically screaming, and then repeating my words to myself after I violently cut off the call.

I jumped in my car and drove as fast as I could to Eloy Zurinaga’s house in the Roma neighborhood, my last resort.

I had never before been so tortured by the slowness of the Mexico City traffic; the irritability of the drivers; the savagery of the dilapidated trucks that ought to have been banned ages ago; the sadness of begging mothers carrying children in their shawls and extending their callused hands; the awfulness of the crippled and the blind asking for alms; the melancholy of the children in clown costumes trying to entertain with their painted faces and the little balls they juggled; the insolence and obscene bungling of the pot-bellied police officers leaning against their motorcycles at strategic highway entrances and exits to collect their bite-size bribes; the insolent pathways cleared for the powerful people in their bulletproof limousines; the desperate, self-absorbed, and absent gaze of old people unsteadily crossing side streets without looking where they were going, those white-haired, nut-faced men and women resigned to die the same way as they lived; the giant billboards advertising an imaginary world of bras and underpants covering small swaths of perfect bodies with white skin and blonde hair, high-priced shops selling luxury and enchanted vacations in promised paradises.

I drove through long cement tunnels as sinister as the labyrinth built for Count Vlad by his vile lackey, the engineer Alcayaga, husband of the no less vile and deceitful María de Lourdes, mother of the sweet but impatient little girl Chepina, whom I began to imagine as yet another monster, an oozing snot-faced young succubus. .

I braked hard in front of the house of my boss, Don Eloy Zurinaga. A manservant with nondescript features opened the door and tried to block my way without anticipating my resolve, my increased strength in the face of uncertainty, born from the lies and the horror with which I confronted the elderly Zurinaga, seated as usual in front of the fireplace, his knees covered with a blanket, and his long white fingers caressing the worn leather of the armchair.

When he saw me, he opened his cloudy eyes, but the rest of his face was still. I paused, surprised by how much and how quickly the old man had aged. He was already old, but now he looked older still, as old as old age itself, because, as I suddenly perceived, this boss was no longer in charge, this man was defeated, his will had been obliterated by a force superior to his own. Eloy Zurinaga still breathed, but his corpse had already been hollowed by terror.

I was frightened to see what had become of a man who was my boss, to whom I owed a certain loyalty if not affection that he himself had never demanded of me, a man who had been above any attack on his indomitable personality. Whether he was honest or not, as I’ve already said, I did not know. But he was skillful, superior, and untouchable. This man had been the greatest expert in the cultivation of indifference that I’d ever met.

Not anymore. Now I stared at him sitting there with the shadows of the fire dancing on his pale face, the remains of a person bereft of beauty or virtue, a wretched old man. However, to my surprise, he still retained a few tricks, and even a bit of daring.

He raised his almost transparent hand. “I know. You figured out that the man with the polo coat and old Stetson whowent to the office was in fact me and not some double. .”

I gave him a questioning look.

“Yes, that was me. The voice that called on the telephone to make you believe that it wasn’t me, that I remained at home, was just a recording.”

He smiled with difficulty.

“That’s why I was so hurried on the phone. I couldn’t allow any interruptions. I had to hang up quickly.”

His old cunning shone again for an instant in his eyes.

“Why did I need to return twice to the office, Navarro, even though that entailed breaking the rule of my absence?”

He left a dramatic pause as though he expected me to answer this rhetorical question.

“Because, on both occasions, I had to consult old, forgotten papers that only I could find.”

He spread his hands like someone who has solved a mystery and thus put an end to an investigation.

“I alone knew where they were. Pardon the mystery.”

But he was no idiot. My eyes, my entire being, told him that this was not why I was visiting him today, and that I couldn’t care less about his stupid tricks. But he was still a relentless lawyer who wouldn’t admit to knowing anything until I told him myself.

“You have played with my life, Don Eloy, and with the lives of my loved ones. Believe me when I say that if you don’t speak frankly with me, I won’t be responsible for my actions.”

He looked at me with the weakness of a wounded father, or a whipped dog. Suddenly he begged for mercy.

“If only you understood me, Yves.”

I said nothing, but standing before him, defiant and angry, I didn’t need to say anything. Zurinaga was defeated, not by me, by himself.

“He promised me eternal youth, immortality.”

Zurinaga raised his vanquished eyes.

“We were the same, you see? When we met, we were the same, both of us young students, and in those days we aged at the same rate.”

“And now, Counselor?”

“He came to see me the night before last. I thought it was to thank me for everything I had done for him, for arranging his move. I had answered his plea: ‘I need fresh blood.’ Oh!”

“So what happened?”

“He was no longer like me. He was young again. He laughed at me. He told me not to expect anything from him. I would never be young again. I had served him, like a menial, nothing more than a worn-out shoe. I would get older and die soon. He would be young forever, thanks to my naïve collaboration. He laughed at me. I was just one of his many servants. He said, ‘I have the power to choose my age. I can look old, young, or even an age in keeping with the natural progress of time.’ ”

The lawyer clucked like a hen. He stared at me with the dying embers of his eyes, and he took my burning hand in his frozen one.

“Go back to Vlad’s house, Navarro. This very night. Soon it will be too late.”

I wanted to let go of his hand, but Eloy Zurinaga had concentrated in his fist all the strength of his deception, his disillusionment, his final breaths.

“Do you understand my predicament?”

“Yes, boss,” I said almost sweetly, sensing his need for consolation, while feeling myself vulnerable because of my affection, memories, and even gratitude.

“You have to hurry. It’s urgent. Have a look at these papers.”

He let go of my hand. I took the papers he proffered and then walked toward the door. He said, as though from a great distance:

“From Vlad, you can expect nothing but evil.”

And in a lower voice:

“Do you think I don’t have scruples or even a conscience? Do you think I don’t have a fever burning in my soul?”

I turned my back on him. I knew that I would never see him again.