Vlad

Chapter 4

The steps for finding our client a home were duly undertaken. Asunción located an available house matching the client’s specifications in the mountainous neighborhood of Lomas Heights. I drew up the contracts and presented them to Don Eloy Zurinaga, who in turn, and contrary to his usual practice, took charge himself of ordering the furniture for the house in a style that was the opposite of his own antiquated taste. Free of Victorian or Neo-Baroque bump-outs, very Roche-Bobois in décor, the Lomas mansion evoked a modern monastery, all right angles and views without clutter. Large empty spaces — floors, walls, ceilings — and comfortable, svelte chairs and couches in black leather. Opaque tables of leaden metal. Not one painting, photo, or even a mirror. The house was built for light, in keeping with the principles of Scandinavian design, designed for environments where great openings were required to let in even a little light, but rather out of place in the sunny reality of Mexico. It’s no wonder that a great Mexican architect like Ricardo Legorreta builds protective shade into his houses to allow for a cool interior, light in color. But I digress: my boss’s client had exiled natural light from this glass palace; he wanted to wall himself in as though in one of his mythical Central European castles, of which Don Eloy had spoken.

Coincidentally, the day that Zurinaga ordered the windows blocked, a veil of clouds had left the house in shadows, and the sparseness of the furnishings was revealed as a necessary deprivation — the better to allow a person to walk around in the dark without tripping over and bumping into everything. A strange detail caught my attention then, because it seemed to compensate for the otherwise stark decor: a great number of drains ran along the walls of the ground floor, as though our client was expecting a flood any day now.

The tunnel was dug from the back of the house to the steep ravine, in accord with the future resident’s instructions, and part of the latter’s slope stripped bare, harvested of its ancient willows and Montezuma cypresses.

“In whose name should I make out the contracts, sir?” I asked Don Eloy Zurinaga.

“In my name,” he said, “as proxy.”

“The power-of-attorney document seems to be missing.”

“Then draft it, Navarro.”

“Fine, but I’ll still need the name of the legal tenant.”

The lawyer Eloy Zurinaga — so forthright but so cold, so courteous but so distant — now hesitated again, the second time he had ever done so in my presence. But no sooner had he lowered his head involuntarily than he collected himself, cleared his throat, tightened his grip on his armchair, and said in a calm voice: “Vladimir Radu. Count Vladimir Radu.”

“All my friends call me Vlad,” said our client, smiling, one night a month later, when, already settled into the house in Lomas, he had summoned me for our first meeting.

“I hope you can excuse my eccentric schedule,” he went on, courteously extending a hand, inviting me to sit down on a black leather sofa. “In wartime one is forced to live by night and to pretend that nothing is ever happening in one’s own dwelling, Monsieur Navarro: that it is uninhabited; that everyone has fled. One must not attract attention.”

He paused reflectively. “I understand that you speak French, Monsieur Navarro.”

“Yes, my mother was a Parisian.”

“Excellent. We will understand each other all the better.”

“But as you say, one must not attract attention. .”

“You’re right. You may call me señor if you like.”

“Mexicans find the monsieur pretentious and annoying.”

“I see your point.”

What did he see? Count Vlad was dressed more like a bohemian, an actor, or an artist than like an aristocrat. He wore all black: black turtleneck shirt, black pants, and black moccasins without socks. His ankles were extremely thin, as was his whole body, but his head was enormous, extra-large but strangely undefined, as though a hawk had disguised itself as a raven, so beneath his artificially placid features, one could all but make out a deeper face that the count had, impossibly, managed to obscure.

Frankly, he looked like a ridiculous marionette. His mahogany-colored hairpiece slid sideways, so he constantly had to adjust it. His overflowing ranchero-style mustache — drooping, rural, shapeless, obviously glued on his upper lip — managed to conceal our client’s mouth, depriving him of those expressions of joy, anger, mockery, and affection that the corners of our mouths frame and, at times, betray. But if the mustache was a disguise, the black sunglasses were the true mask; they completely masked his gaze; they didn’t leave the slightest opening for the light; they fit too tightly over where his eyes must have been and wrapped mercilessly around his tiny, childish, and scarred ears, giving the impression that Count Vlad had been the victim of several botched face-lifts.

His hands were eloquent. He moved them with disagreeable elegance, he closed them with sudden strength, and he didn’t attempt to conceal the strange abnormality of his long glassy nails, as transparent as his windows before he’d had his house sealed.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” he said in a deep, manly, and melodic voice.

I nodded to indicate that I was happy to be of service.

“Can I get you something to drink?” he added right away.

“Perhaps a little red wine,” I accepted out of politeness, “if you’ll be joining me.”

“I never drink,” said the Count, with a theatrical pause, “wine.” As he sat on a black leather ottoman, he asked, “Do you ever get nostalgic for your ancestral home?”

“I never knew it. The Zapatistas burned down the haciendas, and now they’re all fancy hotels, or paradores as the Spaniards called them. .”

He continued as though he hadn’t heard me: “I must tell you that, above all, I do feel a need for my ancestral home. But my land has become impoverished, there have been too many wars, and there are no resources left to survive upon there. . Zurinaga told me a lot about you, Navarro. Haven’t you ever lamented the misfortune of old families, made to endure and to maintain tradition?”

“No,” I said, allowing the hint of a smile to help shape my words, “not really.”

“There are some types of families that become lethargic,” he went on, again as though he hadn’t heard me, “and they settle all too easily for what they refer to as modern life. Life, Navarro! Does this brief passage, this instant between the womb and the tomb, even deserve to be called life?”

“You’re making me nostalgic,” I said, in an effort to be amusing, “for the good old days of feudalism.”

He tilted his head to one side and adjusted his toupee. “Where does our inexplicable sadness come from? It must have a reason, a cause, a source. Do you know? We’re an exhausted people: so much internecine warfare, so much blood spilled for nothing. . Such sorrow! Everything contains the seed of its own ruin. In things, that ruin is called decay. In people it’s called death.”

My client’s digressions made his conversation difficult to follow. There was little opportunity for small talk with the Count, and metaphysical statements about life and death have never been my specialty. As though to illustrate his morbid point, quick-witted Vlad (as in “Call me Vlad” and “All my friends call me Vlad”) walked over to the piano where he played Chopin’s saddest prelude, providing a peculiar sort of divertissement. I was amused by the way his wig and glue-on mustache stumbled with the movements of his performance. But I couldn’t laugh when I looked at those hands with their long, translucent fingernails caressing the keys without breaking.

What I saw was distracting. I had no interest in being hypnotized by his eccentric character and that melancholy music. When I lowered my head, I was reminded of that other exceedingly strange detail — the marble floor was flecked with countless drains, distributed throughout the living room.

Outside it began to rain. I heard drops hitting the covered windows. Nervous, I sat up and granted myself permission to stroll through the house while listening to the Count playing piano. I meandered from the living room to the dining room that had once overlooked the ravine. Here too the windows were blocked off. In their place, a long painted mural of a landscape — using the technique of trompe l’oeil to trick a viewer into seeing a three-dimensional reality — stretched across the length of the wall. An ancient castle arose in the middle of a desolate countryside, where birds of prey circled a dry forest and a wasteland occupied by wolves. On the castle’s terrace, minutely depicted, a woman and a little girl stood, terrified and imploring.

I had thought there wouldn’t be any paintings in this house.

I shook my head to shoo away the image.

Then I took the liberty of interrupting Count Vlad.

“Count, Sir, I just need you to sign these documents. If you don’t mind, could you to do it now? It’s getting late, and I’m expected for dinner.”

I held out the papers and a pen to the tenant. He sat up, adjusting his ridiculous wig.

“How fortunate!” he said. “You have a family.”

“Yes,” I stammered. “My wife was the one who found this house for you.”

“Ah! I hope she’ll come visit me one of these days.”

“She is very busy, you know, with her business.”

“Ah! But I’m sure that she knew this house before I did, Mr. Navarro. She walked through these hallways. She stood in this living room. .”

“Of course, yes, of course. .”

“Tell her she left her scent behind.”

“Say again?”

“Yes, tell — is her name Asunción? Asunción, that’s what my friend Zurinaga told me she’s called. Like the Feast of the Asunción? The Assumption?. . Tell Asunción that her scent still lingers, suspended in the air of this house.”

“Why not? Your gallantry—”

“Tell your wife that I am breathing her scent. .”

“Yes, I will. How very gallant,” I said. “Now, if you’ll please excuse me, good night. And enjoy your stay.”

“I have a ten-year-old daughter. You do, too, don’t you?”

“Yes, Count, that’s right.”

“I hope that they’ll meet and like each other. Bring her around, so she can play with Minea.”

“Minea?”

“My daughter, Mr. Navarro. Let Borgo know.”

“Borgo?”

“My servant.”

Vlad snapped his fingers, which made the sound of a rattle and a castanet. His glass fingernails shone. Then a small, twisted man appeared, a small hunchback with the most beautiful face that I have ever seen on a man. He was a sculptural vision, one of those ideal profiles from ancient Greece, like Cellini’s Perseus. Borgo’s was a face of perfect symmetry brutally set above a deformed body, both disparate aspects united by his long mane of feminine, honey-colored curls. His expression was sad, ironic, and coarse.

“At your service, monsieur,” said the servant, in French, with a distant accent.

I hurried my goodbyes, trying not to be rude but without success: “I believe everything is in order. I suppose we won’t be seeing each other again. Enjoy your stay. Thank you. . I mean, goodnight.” I regretted, in an instant, having offended my client.

I could not parse, beyond so many layers of disguises, his look of disdain, scorn, and glee. I could superimpose onto Count Vlad any expression that I chose. He wore a mask. Borgo the servant, on the contrary, had nothing to hide, and I admit that his transparency frightened me more than the truculence of the Count, who bade me good-bye as though I had not said a word.

“Don’t forget. Tell your wife — Asunción, right? — that your little girl is always welcome.”

Borgo brought a candle near his master’s face and added, “We could play together, the three of us.”

He cackled and slammed the door in my face.