Pan's Labyrinth, page 13
One clean shot.
Vidal approached the outstretched body and crushed the glasses next to it under his boot. He still didn’t understand why the fool hadn’t obeyed him, but he was strangely relieved the good doctor was dead and he would never have to look into those soft and far-too-thoughtful eyes again.
“Capitán!”
Two of the maids were standing in front of the barn, their faces pale with worry. Vidal pushed the pistol back into his holster. He could barely make sense of what they were saying. His wife was not well, that’s what he finally picked up from their frightened nattering—and that his son was on the way, while the doctor who had been supposed to help with his birth was lying dead in the mud behind him.
When the Faun Fell in Love
There is a forest in Galicia so ancient some of the trees remember a time when animals took the shape of men and men grew wings and fur. Some men, the trees whisper, even became oak and beech and laurel and drove their roots so deeply into the ground they forgot their names. There is one fig tree especially whose story the others like to tell when the wind makes their leaves murmur. It grows on a hill at the heart of the forest. One can spot it easily, as the two main branches bend like the horns of a goat and the trunk is split, as if the tree gave birth to something growing under its bark.
Yes! the forest whispers. That’s why the trunk is split open like a wound. This tree did give birth, for it was once a woman who danced and sang under my canopy. She picked my berries and braided her hair with my flowers. But one day she met a Faun who liked to play his flute under my trees in the moonlight. He’d fashioned the flute from the finger bones of an ogre and his tune sang of the dark underground kingdom he came from, so different from the light the woman carried inside.
All this is true, and she fell in love with the Faun nevertheless, with a love as deep and inescapable as a well, and the Faun loved her back. When he finally asked her to come with him to his underground world, however, she dreaded the thought of spending the rest of her life without ever seeing the stars or feeling the wind on her skin. So she decided to stay and watched him leave. However, the love she felt filled her with such longing, her feet grew roots to follow her beloved underground, while her arms reached for the sky and the stars she’d chosen over him.
Oh, the heartache she felt. It made her soft skin turn to bark. Her sighs became the rustling of the wind in a thousand leaves and, when the Faun came back one moonlit night to play his flute for her, all he found was a tree whispering the name he had never told anyone but her.
The Faun sat down between the tree’s roots and felt his own tears like dew on his face. The branches he sat under showered him with flowers, but his lover couldn’t throw her arms around him or kiss his lips anymore. He felt such a pain in his wild and fearless heart that when he caressed the tree his own skin—once covered with silken fur—became as rough and wooden as the bark of his lost love.
The Faun sat under the tree all night until the sun rose and drove him away. Its bright light had never become him and when he had returned to the dark womb of the earth, the tree bent her branches deeper and deeper in sadness until they resembled her lover’s horned head.
Eight months later, on a full moon night, the trunk of the tree split with a soft moan and a child stepped out. It was a boy, graced with the beauty of his mother, while the horns in his green hair and the hooves on his slender legs gave away his father. He pranced and danced down the hill like his mother had once danced under the trees, and he made himself a flute from bird bones to fill the forest with a song that sang of love and loss.
Deep underground, where he was instructing a princess in the tasks of her parents’ court, the Faun heard the flute’s music. He excused himself and rushed through secret passageways known only to him to the Upper Kingdom. But when he arrived, the sound of the flute was nowhere to be heard, and all he found was a track of small hooves on the wet moss, washed away by the rain after a few dancing steps.
30
Don’t Hurt Her
Her mother was screaming. Ofelia was sitting on a bench a maid had put outside her mother’s bedroom and she could hear it through the wall. The Wolf was sitting next to her, just an arm’s length away, staring blindly at the wooden railing through which she had sometimes watched the maids in the hall below. Did he also, Ofelia wondered, feel the urge to throw himself over the handrail each time her mother let out another tormented scream? To shatter the aching heart on the stone tiles just to find relief from all the fear and pain? But life is even stronger than Death, so Ofelia stayed on the bench next to the Wolf who had lured her mother to this house to scream and bleed.
Ofelia was sure everything would have been all right if her mother hadn’t thrown the mandrake into the fire. Or if Ofelia had only hidden it better. And if she’d resisted the grapes of the Pale Man. . . .
Another scream.
Did she wish her brother to die for hurting her mother so badly? She couldn’t say. She wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Her heart was so numb from all that fear and pain. Did her brother make their mother scream because he was as cruel as his father? No. He probably couldn’t help it. After all, no one had asked him whether he wished to be born. Maybe he’d been happy where he was before. Maybe it was the same world the Faun claimed she came from. In that case she’d have to tell her brother how hard it would be to get back to it.
One of the maids rushed by with a jug of water.
Vidal followed her with his eyes.
His son. He would lose his son. He didn’t care about the woman screaming in that room. A tailor’s wife . . . wrong choices throughout all his life. He should have known she was too weak to keep his son safe. He needed that son.
In the bedroom behind him Mercedes was fighting Death. Along with the medic and the other maids.
Everything was red with blood: the sheets of the bed, the hands of the medic who was used to the screams of injured soldiers but not to the pain life caused coming into this world and the white nightgown Ofelia’s father had sown for Carmen.
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.
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.
