فصل پانزدهم

15

Blood

The key Vidal used to unlock the barn was not made from gold. For the peasants waiting in front of the withered gates, though, the key unlocked far greater treasure. It was early in the morning, but they were lining up all across the yard, many of them with their children. Hunger was a regular guest at their tables, as regular as their family members and the words bread, salt, beans, or potatoes sounded far more magical to them than any treasure described in the fairy tales of their childhood.

Vidal had two soldiers guarding the barn doors, while another, sitting at a table they’d brought from the house, was checking the vouchers.

“Have your ration cards ready for inspection!” Lieutenant Aznar, who’d been given the task to hand out the vouchers, barked the words with the confidence only a uniform can grant. He didn’t know how it felt to wait in a line just to fill your empty stomach. He came from a butcher’s family, and the worn figures with their tired faces and bent backs looked like an inferior species to him. For sure they were not his kind.

“Hurry up!” he barked at an old man, grabbing the voucher from his outstretched hand. “Your name. First and last.” The lieutenant’s butcher father had never looked like this old man. So exhausted, so marked by life.

“Narciso Peña Soriano . . . at your service,” the old man said. They were all at their service. All their lives.

Aznar waved him into the barn.

“Name!” he called, and the line moved silently.

Mercedes and two other maids brought out baskets filled with fresh bread. Lieutenant Medem, who had brought all the treasure to the mill, held up one of the loaves of bread from Mercedes’s basket.

“This is our daily bread in Franco’s Spain!” his voice boomed across the yard. “Kept safe in this mill. The Reds lie when they tell you we let you starve. . . .” Medem’s words drifted up to the room Ofelia shared with her mother, waking her from a sleep heavy with dreams of the Faun and the Toad and the key that would unlock . . . what? Ofelia wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Words kept drifting in from outside.

“. . . in a united Spain there is not a single home. . . .”

Ofelia slipped silently out of the bed so as to not wake her mother. Home . . .

“. . . not a single home without fire or bread!”

Bread. The word made her hungry. So hungry. After all, she’d been sent to bed without supper after quite an exhausting adventure.

“. . . not a single home without fire or bread.” Even Ofelia knew that was a lie, though it was proclaimed with so much confidence. When do children realize that adults lie?

Was the Faun lying? He had looked even more sinister in Ofelia’s dreams. How do I know that what you say is true? Her mother was moaning in her sleep and her face was glistening with sweat, although the sun hadn’t warmed the house yet. She didn’t wake when Ofelia tiptoed to the bathroom over the dusty floorboards spotted with morning light, but Ofelia locked the door nevertheless before she pulled the Faun’s book from behind the radiator. Its pages were once again white as snow.

“Come on!” Ofelia whispered. “What happens next? Show me!”

And the book obeyed.

A speck of red appeared on the left-hand page. Another seeped through the page on the right. They both spread as fast as ink on wet paper. Red. Red running over the white pages, until it filled the crack between them and dripped onto Ofelia’s bare feet.

She immediately knew what this meant, though she couldn’t tell why. She raised her eyes from the book and stared at the door, behind which her mother was sleeping.

A muffled scream escaped the reddened pages.

Ofelia dropped the book and rushed to the door. She pushed it open to find her mother leaning heavily against the bed frame and pressing her hand against her belly. Her white nightgown was soaked in blood.

“O—Ofelia!” she stammered hoarsely, raising her hand pleadingly, her fingers red with her own blood. “Help me!” Then she collapsed to the floor.

Vidal was in the yard, checking his watch, hiding its broken face with his black leather glove. How long it was taking to feed these peasants. So much time wasted just because one couldn’t trust them. Vidal would have betted his uniform that some of them would take their provisions into the forest anyway to feed a relative or lover who’d joined the traitors. How he wished he could just break and kill them all like he had the rabbit poachers.

“Capitán!”

He turned around.

Had the girl lost her mind? She came running toward him in her nightgown. Usually she hid from him like a creature that knew it was best to stay invisible. Her mother wouldn’t listen when he’d suggested to leave the girl for a while with her grandparents. That daughter was a weakness of hers and the only issue on which she dared to fight him, but he had no intention of raising a dead tailor’s child.

Vidal’s steps were stiff with anger as he walked toward the girl, but when he stopped in front of her he realized that the fear in Ofelia’s face hadn’t been caused by him.

“Come quickly!” she cried. “Please!”

Only then did Vidal notice the blood on her dress. It clearly wasn’t the girl’s. Fear stirred in the depth of his heart, fear and anger. Foolish woman. She would fail him and the child he gave her. He yelled at Serrano to get the doctor.

The sky had opened up and was once again soaking the world in rain. The perfect weather to match Dr. Ferreira’s mood as he crossed the yard to report on his patient.

He found Vidal standing in front of the barn, staring at the tents and trucks he’d brought to the mill. To Ferreira they looked like abandoned toys against the fir trees looming above them. He put his jacket on. There was some blood on the sleeves.

“Your wife needs uninterrupted rest. She should be sedated most of the time until she gives birth.” You should never have brought her here, he added in his mind. You should never have made her daughter see her like this. But instead he only said: “The girl should sleep somewhere else. I’ll stay here until the child is born.” Vidal was still staring over the yard.

“Make her well,” he said, without taking his eyes off the rain. “I don’t care what it costs or what you need.” When he finally turned to Ferreira his face was rigid with anger. Anger at what? Ferreira wondered. At life? At himself for bringing his pregnant wife here? No. A man like Vidal never blamed himself. He was probably angry at the mother of his future child for proving herself to be so weak.

“Make her well,” Vidal repeated. “Cure her.”

It was an order. And a threat.