Vlad

Chapter 14

I walked like a somnambulist to the white living room with black furniture and numerous drains, and there I sat and waited. When my wife appeared, dressed in black, her hair let down, her gaze fixed, I felt sympathy and antipathy, attraction and repulsion, vast tenderness and an equally great fear.

I stood and offered my hand to draw her closer to me. Asunción rejected the invitation and sat across from me with a vacant look. She didn’t touch me.

“Darling,” I said, leaning my head and torso forward until my hands clasped my knees, “I’ve come for you. I’ve come for our girl. I think all of this is just a nightmare. Let’s collect Magda. The car is parked right outside. Asunción, quick, let’s get out of here quick.”

She looked at me in just the way I had looked at her when she came in, except that she displayed only half of my feelings: antipathy, repulsion, and fear. Which reduced my hand to fear alone.

“Do you love my daughter?” she asked in a new voice that sounded as though she’d swallowed sand, banishing me from our shared parenthood with that cruel, cold possessive: my daughter.

“Asunción. . Magda,” I managed to mumble.

“Do you remember Didier?”

“Asunción, he was our son.”

“Is. He is my son.”

“Ours, Asunción. He died. We loved him, we remember him, but he no longer is. He was.”

“Magdalena won’t die,” Asunción declared with an icy calm. “The boy died. The girl will never die. I will never again have to live through that grief.”

How, under these circumstances, could I say something to her along the lines of “we’re all going to die, someday”—when in my wife’s voice and eyes, she had already conjured something like an eternal flame, this belief that she kept repeating. .

“My daughter will not die. There will be no mourning her. Magdalena will live forever.”

Was this her sacrifice? Was this the outer limit of maternal love? Was I supposed to think highly of the mother for making this sacrifice?

“It’s not a sacrifice,” she said as though she’d been reading my mind. “I am here because of Magda. But I am also here for my own pleasure. I want to make sure you know that.”

I recovered my speech then like a bull that has been lanced in the nape of its neck so that it charges all the harder.

“I spoke with that evil old creature,” I said.

“Zurinaga? You spoke to Zurinaga?”

This confused me. “Yes, I spoke to Zurinaga too, but I was talking about that other old creature, Vlad. .”

“I made the deal with Zurinaga,” she continued. “Zurinaga was the middleman. He sent Magdalena’s picture to Vlad. He offered me the deal in Vladimiro’s name. .”

“Vladimiro,” I tried to smile. “He tricked Zurinaga, you know. He offered him eternal life and then sent him straight to hell. The same thing is going to happen to you two.”

“He offered me the deal in Vladimiro’s name,” Asunción continued, ignoring me. “Eternal life for my daughter. Zurinaga knew about my fear. He told Vladimiro all about it.”

“In exchange,” I interrupted, “you would have sex with Vlad.”

For the first time she gave a hint of a smile. Saliva ran down her chin.

“No, even without the girl, I’d choose to be here. .”

“Asunción,” I said, upset. “My adored Asunción, my wife, my love. .”

“Your love, adored and bored,” she said with eyes of black diamond. “Your wife, prisoner of daily tedium.”

“Love,” I said almost with desperation, certainly with disbelief. “Remember our passionate nights together. How can you say that? You and I, we’ve loved each other with passion.”

“Those are the first moments that are forgotten,” she said without moving a muscle in her face. “Your repetitious love is tiresome; your faithfulness, a bore. I’ve spent years preparing myself for Vladimiro, without knowing it. None of this just happens, as you seem to think, all of a sudden.”

Because I had no new words, I repeated the ones I already knew:

“Remember our passion.”

“You’re so ordinary,” she spat out along with the foam that leaked from her lips. “I don’t want ordinary.”

“Asunción, you’re headed for horror, you’re going to live in horror, I don’t understand you, you’re going to be horribly miserable. .”

She looked at me as if to say “I know,” but then she took another tack:

“Yes, I want a man who can hurt me. And you’re way too good for that.”

She allowed herself a dreadful pause.

“Your faithfulness is a plague.”

Having recovered from my astonishment, I played another card. This gambit involved swallowing my pride, its injury overcome thanks to my steadfast love, the true love that celebrates its own limits and loves despite imperfection.

“You’re saying all this so that I’ll get angry with you, darling, and leave embittered but resigned. .”

“I’m not a prisoner here,” she said, shaking her long lustrous mane, so similar now to the magnificence of Vlad’s replenished hair. “No, I have escaped from your prison.”

A hissing fury seized her tongue, spreading thick saliva:

“I enjoy being with Vlad. He’s a man who instantly knows all a woman’s weaknesses. .”

But that snake’s voice ceased as soon as she repeated that she was unable to resist Vlad’s attraction. Vlad had broken our life of tedious habit.

“And I’m on fire for him, even though he’s only using me, even though he wants the girl and not me. .”

Her eyes were shiny with unshed tears.

“Go, Yves, while you still can. You can’t stop what’s already happening. If you like, you can imagine that, even if I’m hurting you, I will still be fond of you. But get out of here, and as you go on living, ask yourself, which of us has lost more? Did I take more away from you, or you from me? As long as you can’t answer that question, you won’t know anything about me. .”

She laughed impudently.

“Go,” she said. “Vlad doesn’t tolerate shared loyalties.”

But I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t understand the forces I was up against.

“For me, you will always be beautiful, desirable, Asunción. .”

“No,” she lowered her head, “no, not anymore, not for anyone. .”

“I’m sorry to interrupt this tender domestic scene,” Vlad said, appearing suddenly. “The night marches on, and we have duties, my dear Asunción. .”

At that moment, blood bubbled up from every drain in the living room.

My wife rose and quickly left the room, lifting her skirt over the red puddles.

Vlad looked at me with polite irony.

“May I escort you to the door, Mr. Navarro?”

The automatic responses of my education and my ancestral courtesy cumulatively overcame my weakened resistance. I sat up and walked, led by the Count, to the mansion’s door in Bosques de las Lomas.

We crossed the space between the front door and the wrought-iron gate facing the street.

“Don’t fight it anymore, Navarro. Ignore the endless advance of death. Be content. Go back to the curse of work, which for you is a blessing. I know and I understand. You live life. I covet life. That’s an important distinction. What we have in common is that, in this world, we all use each other. Some of us win, others lose. Accept this.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. I shuddered.

“Or join us, Navarro. Yes, why not become a part of my wandering tribe? Look at what I’m offering you, despite your incorruptible pride: stay here with your wife and daughter forever. . Think about it. If you don’t stay with us, you won’t see your wife and daughter ever again, you know. Nobody will see them. Nobody but me. .”

We were in front of the gate, between the street and the house.

“That’s not what you want. You’ll die without ever seeing them again. Navarro, think it over.”

He raised a glassy-fingernailed hand.

“And hurry. Tomorrow we’ll be gone. If you go now, you might never see us again. But, then again, do bear in mind that my absence is often deceptive. I always find a weakness, a crack through which I can slip back in, if need be. If such a friend as you, so highly regarded, were to summon me, I would return. I assure you, I’d be there. .”

My whole being, yes, my schooling, my habits, my entire life, impelled me to choose the work, health, and pleasure that are permitted us human beings. Here was only sickness. Death. Yet, struggling against everything inside me was an intolerable and uncertain tenderness toward this poor creature. He wasn’t the origin of evil. He was a victim. He was not born a monster; they turned him into a vampire. . He was a creature of his daughter, Minea, just another victim, poor Vlad. .

The cursed Count played his last card.

“Your wife and daughter will live forever. If that alone is of no interest to you, wouldn’t you like your son to come back to life too? Would you despise that possibility as well? Don’t look at me like that, Navarro. I’m not in the habit of joking about matters of life and death. Look, your car is parked over there. Take a good look and make up your mind quickly. I’m in a hurry to leave.”

I looked at him inquiringly.

“You’re leaving?”

Vlad answered coldly: “You will forget this place and this day. You were never in this house. Never.”

“You’re leaving Mexico City?” I asked again, my voice sounding distant and anesthetized.

“No, Navarro. I’m going to lose myself in Mexico City, just as in the past I lost myself in London, in Rome, in Bremerhaven, in New Orleans, wherever my imagination and the fear of mortals like you have led me. Now I will lose myself in perhaps the most populous city on the planet. I will blend in with the nocturnal crowds, already savoring the abundance of fresh blood, ready to make it mine, to resume my thirst, the thirst for the ancient sacrifice that is at the origin of all history. . But don’t forget this: my friends always call me Vlad.”

I turned my back on this vampire, on his horror, on his fatalism. Yes, I was going to choose life and work, even though my heart had already died forever. And yet, a sacred voice, hidden until that moment, whispered into my ear, from within my soul, that the secret of the world is that it’s unfinished, because God himself is unfinished. Perhaps, like the vampire, God is a nocturnal and mysterious being who has not yet manifested or understood Himself, and that is why he needs us. To live so that God doesn’t die. To carry on living the unfinished work of a yearning God.

I gave a last sidelong glance at the gully of felled trees that had been turned into stakes. Magda and Minea laughed and swung between the stakes, singing:

Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,

and I will sing a lullaby:

rock them, rock them, lullaby. .

I felt my will to live drained, slipping away like the blood down the drains of the vampire’s mansion. I didn’t even have the will to accept the deal Vlad had offered. Work, the rewards of life, the pleasures. . Everything had escaped me. I was defeated by all that remained undone. I felt the pain of the terrible nostalgia for what was not and would never be. What had I lost on this awful day? Not love, which persisted in spite of everything. Not love, but hope. Vlad had left me without hope, with no consolation except to feel that what happened had happened to another, the feeling that everything came from somewhere else, even though it had happened to me: I was the sieve, an intangible mystery had passed through me but had come and gone, from somewhere to somewhere else. . And yet, might its passage not have changed me nevertheless, and forever?

I went out onto the street.

The wrought-iron gate shut behind me.

I could not resist a final look at Count Vlad’s mansion.

Something even stranger than everything I had already seen was happening.

The Bosques de las Lomas house, its airy modern glass façade and its clean geometric lines, were dissolving before my eyes, as if they were melting. As the modern house dissolved, another house appeared little by little in its place, changing the new into the old, glass into stone, the substitution of one form for another.

There was appearing, little by little, behind the veil of the visible house, the shape of an ancient, ruined, uninhabitable castle, already pervaded with that smell I knew from the coffin-lined tunnel: an unstable edifice, creaky like the hull of a very old ship run aground amid rugged mountains, a castle with a ruined watchtower, with eatenaway battlements, with threatening towers flanking it on all sides, with moldy gates, with a dry and slimy moat, and with the highest tower, the tower of homage, bearing the castle’s master, Vlad watching me with his dark sunglasses, telling me he would leave this place and that I would never recognize it if I returned, summoning me back into the catacomb, warning me that I would never again be able to live a normal life, no matter how hard I struggled, because despite everything I would know that my life force was already buried in a tomb, that I myself would thenceforth live, wherever I was, in the vampire’s tomb, and that however much I affirmed my will to live, I was condemned to death because I would live with the knowledge of what I had undergone so that Vlad’s black tribe would not perish.

Then, from a side tower, they flew clumsily away, clumsily because they were like monstrous rats endowed with varicose wings, the blind Vespertilios, the bats guided by the power of their filthy, long, hairy ears, emigrating to a new sepulcher.

Were Asunción, my wife, and Magda, my daughter, among the flock of blind rats?

I approached my parked car.

Something was moving inside the vehicle.

Someone.

A blurred figure.

When I could finally make it out, I screamed in a mixture of horror and joy.

I raised my hands to my eyes, I hid my gaze, and I could only mutter:

“No, no, no. .”