Carlos Fuentes: Vlad

I stared at him intensely, unable to wake him and demand an explanation, paralyzed by the terror of this encounter, hypnotized by the details I was only now discovering, having Vlad before me, prostrate, at my mercy, but I was clueless, after all, about which actions I could take, under the sway, as I was, of the legend of the vampire, the tactics recommended by superstition and science, in this case indistinguishable. The garlic necklace, the cross, the stake. .

The intense cold in the tunnel drew fog from my open mouth, but it also cleared my head and allowed me to observe closely certain phenomena: Vlad’s ears — too small, and surrounded by scars, which I attributed to a series of facial surgeries — had grown overnight. I saw them struggle to spread out like the wings of a sinister bat. What did this damned creature do — trim his ears every evening before going out into the world in order to disguise his resemblance to a nocturnal chiropter?

A drop of some horrid liquid splattered on my head. I lifted my gaze. Bats hung upside down, holding on to the tunnel’s rock ceiling by their claws.

An unbearable stench emerged from the corners of Vlad’s coffin, where bat guano — vampire shit — had collected. .

Vampire shit. Count Vlad’s ears. The phalanx of blind rats hanging over my head. These were insignificant compared to the most sinister detail.

Vlad’s eyes.

Vlad’s eyes without his dark, ever-present sunglasses. Two empty sockets.

Two eyes without eyes.

Two lagoons incarnate with crimson shores and depths of black blood.

That’s when the realization finally sank in. Vlad did not have eyes. His black sunglasses were his real eyes. They allowed him to see.

I don’t know what affected me the most when I quickly shut the lid of the coffin in which Count Vlad slept.

I don’t know if it was the horror itself.

I do not know if it was the surprise, or my lacking the tools to destroy him right then and there — my empty, vulnerable hands.

No. I do know.

I know that it was my concern over my wife, Asunción, and my daughter, Magdalena. I had a suspicion, one that would be rejected by daylight logic, that something might have united Vlad’s destiny to that of my family. . and if that was the case, I had no right to touch anything, to disturb the mortal peace of the monster.

I tried to recover the normal rhythm of my breathing. My heart pounded with fear. But when I breathed, I noticed the real smell of this catacomb built for Count Vlad, the smell beneath the ammoniacal stench of batshit. It wasn’t a smell that I recognized. I tried but couldn’t associate it with scents I knew. This smell that permeated the tunnel was not only distinct from any other scent that I had ever smelled, was not only different. . it was a stench that came from somewhere else entirely. From a faraway place.

I made it home just before one o’clock in the afternoon. At my house in the El Pedregal neighborhood of San Ángel, our maid, Candelaria, welcomed me in great distress.

“Oh, Señor! I was terrified! That was the first time nobody came home at night! I was all alone.”

What? Had my wife not returned? Where had our daughter gone?

I telephoned Mrs. Alcayaga.

“How are you, Yves? Yes, Magdalena went to school with Chepina very early this morning. No, nothing to worry about. She’s such a tidy little girl and cuter than a button. I ironed her clothes myself while she took a shower. At the school, I explained that Magdita wouldn’t be in uniform today because she wound up sleeping over the night before. Okay, see ya, bye.”

I phoned Asunción’s office. “No,” her secretary said, “she hasn’t been here since yesterday. Is something the matter?”

I showered, shaved, and changed my clothes.

“Don’t you want your chilaquiles, Señor?” asked Candelaria. “Your coffee?”

“Thanks, Candelaria, but I’m in a big hurry. If my wife shows up, tell her to stay put and wait for me.”

I looked around the living room out of the unbreakable habit of checking that everything was in order before going out. We notice nothing when everything is in its place. We feel at ease when we go out. Nothing is out of place; habit reassures us. .

There were no flowers in the house. The bouquets habitually arranged with such care and joy by Asunción, in the vestibule, in the living and dining rooms, visible from where I stood about to go out, were not there. There were no flowers in the house.

So I asked, “Candelaria, why aren’t there any flowers?”

The maid’s face looked grave. Her eyes staunched a reproach.

“The Señora threw them in the trash, Señor. Before going out yesterday, she said, ‘They’re all dried out, I forgot to put them in water. Throw them out already. .’ ”

The crystalline afternoon surprised me. Our valley of sickly haze, once a place of such clear air, had recovered its high visibility and its gorgeous cumulus clouds. This scene restored the mettle that the recent series of unsettling and strange events had snatched away from me.

I drove fast but carefully. Despite everything that had happened, my good habits came back to me, and those habits reinforced my reason. I longed for the city as it used to be, back when the capital was small, safe, walkable, breathable, crowned with awe-inspiring clouds, and encircled by mountains cut out with scissors. .

Soon, I was disconcerted again.

“No,” the school principal said, “Magdalena is absent today.”

“But her classmates, her little friends, can I speak with them, with Chepina?”

No, the girls had not seen Magdalena at any party yesterday.

“At your party, Chepina.”

“There was no party, sir.”

“It was your birthday.”

“No, sir, my saint’s day falls on the day of the Virgin.”

“Of the Assumption, yesterday?”

“No sir, the Feast of the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, that’s my saint’s day, but that’s still a long way off.”

The girl looked at me with impatience. I had come during her class’s recess and was stealing precious minutes of her free time. Her baffled friends stared at Chepina.

I called Chepina’s mother right away. I complained bitterly. Why had she lied to me?

“Please,” she said in a tremulous voice, “don’t ask me anything. Please, Mr. Navarro, I am begging for my life.”

“What about my daughter’s life? My daughter?” I demanded, practically screaming, and then repeating my words to myself after I violently cut off the call.

I jumped in my car and drove as fast as I could to Eloy Zurinaga’s house in the Roma neighborhood, my last resort.

I had never before been so tortured by the slowness of the Mexico City traffic; the irritability of the drivers; the savagery of the dilapidated trucks that ought to have been banned ages ago; the sadness of begging mothers carrying children in their shawls and extending their callused hands; the awfulness of the crippled and the blind asking for alms; the melancholy of the children in clown costumes trying to entertain with their painted faces and the little balls they juggled; the insolence and obscene bungling of the pot-bellied police officers leaning against their motorcycles at strategic highway entrances and exits to collect their bite-size bribes; the insolent pathways cleared for the powerful people in their bulletproof limousines; the desperate, self-absorbed, and absent gaze of old people unsteadily crossing side streets without looking where they were going, those white-haired, nut-faced men and women resigned to die the same way as they lived; the giant billboards advertising an imaginary world of bras and underpants covering small swaths of perfect bodies with white skin and blonde hair, high-priced shops selling luxury and enchanted vacations in promised paradises.