فصل سی ام

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.