Carlos Fuentes: Vlad

She moved away, smiling.

“Look, Daddy. This is my friend Minea.”

I turned to see this other girl, the one called Minea, who took my Magdalena by the hand and drew her away from me. My little girl was dressed in her navy-blue school uniform with a white collar and a red bowtie.

The other girl was dressed all in pink, like the dolls that I had seen that morning in the pink bedroom. She wore a pink dress attached to a loose-fitting, frilly skirt with cloth roses sewn at the waist, pink stockings, and black patent-leather shoes. She had voluminous golden ring-lets and tresses of corkscrew curls, with a huge pink bow crowning her head.

She was from another time. But she was identical to my daughter (who was also, as I mentioned, thanks to the influence of her mother, not exactly a modern girl).

The same height, the same face. Only their attire was different.

“What are you doing, Magda?” I said, suppressing my amazement.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the stakes in the gully.

I saw nothing out of the ordinary.

“The squirrels, Daddy.”

Yes, there were squirrels running up and down the trunks, scurrying nervously, and pausing to watch us, as though we were intruders, before they resumed their race.

“They’re adorable, sweetheart. We have lots of them in the garden behind our house, you remember?”

Magdalena giggled, covering her mouth with a hand. She lifted the skirt of her school uniform while Minea did the same with her own skirt. Minea stuck her hand into the front of her own panties and took out a squirming squirrel, which she held tightly in her hands.

“Daddy, I bet you didn’t know that squirrels’ teeth grow inside until they pierce the top of their heads. .”

My daughter took the squirrel that Minea offered to her and, lifting the skirt of her school uniform, she put the squirrel down her own panties, over her genitals.

I felt consumed by my horror. I had kept my gaze low, looking down at the girls without noticing Borgo’s watchful proximity.

The servant approached my daughter and caressed her neck. I was revolted. Borgo laughed.

“Not to worry, Monsieur Navarro. My master doesn’t allow me more than this. Il se réserve les petits choux bien pour lui . .”

He spoke like a cook caressing a hen before cutting off its head. He let go of Magda, showing his empty hands in a plea for peace. In the slowly falling night of the plateau, it was becoming hard to make out what I was seeing in front of me.

“On the other hand, since Minea is part of the household. .”

The lewd servant lifted the other girl’s skirt and pulled up her pink ruffled dress until her face was covered, exposing her naked chest with its prepubescent nipples. Kneeling in front of Minea, he sucked on them.

“Oh, Monsieur Navarro!” he said, interrupting his filthy performance. “What shapely, budding nipples! What bliss!”

He moved his face away, and I saw that, on Minea’s chest, the nipples had now disappeared.

I searched for my daughter’s gaze, trying to divert her attention from these ghastly sights.

I don’t know if I betrayed my disgust.

Magda’s eyes seemed to say to me, “I hate you. You’re embarrassing me. Leave me alone. I’m playing with my friend.”

Go back to Vlad’s house. Soon it will be too late.

Zurinaga’s words resonated in that murky evening just beginning out there on the Mexican plateau, where hot days yield, in a split second, to cold nights.

Though that revolting display along the ravine sickened me, it did not divert me from my clear objectives: to confront the monster and to save my family. I did not abandon Magdalena, tempted as I was to flee.

Turning my back on Borgo, Minea, and my daughter, I located the entrance to the tunnel at the edge of the gully; I pushed open the metal door and entered the accursed Alcayaga’s passageway, brand-new but already suffused with the mossy smell of centuries, as if — instead of having been constructed on site — it had been transported from the distant lands of Vlad Radu’s native Wallachia.

Again that aroma, as though of sensually corrupt meats, sweetly rotting.

Tar and barnacles from ancient seas clung to the coffins. The smoky smell of sand that came from far away, from a land that was not my own, arose from creaky wooden planks and moldy nails.

I walked through the tunnel quickly, because I had already satisfied my curiosity about this lugubrious traveling cemetery — until I stopped and had to muffle a gasp. Vlad had appeared from behind a casket, blocking my way.

For a second, I didn’t recognize him. He was wrapped in a mounted dragoon’s cape, and black and lustrous hair fell to his shoulders. This wasn’t just another wig. It was the hair of his youth — renewed, once again shiny and thick. I only recognized him by the shape of his face, by his chalky pallor, and by the black sunglasses that masked his bloody sockets.

I recalled Zurinaga’s bitter quotation of Vlad’s boast: he could choose his age at will, appear old, young, or even an age in keeping with the natural progress of time. He could fool us all. .

“Where are you heading in such a hurry, Mr. Navarro?” he asked in his deep, slick voice.

That simple question threw me off my game. I had only left my daughter in the ravine so that I could confront Vlad. And here he was. But I had to give him another answer.

“I’m looking for my wife.”

“Your wife doesn’t interest me.”

“That’s good to know. I want to see her so that we can take Magdalena away with us. I’m not going to let you destroy our home.”

Vlad smiled like a cat breakfasting on canaries.

“Navarro, let me explain the situation.”

He turned with preternatural swiftness and opened a coffin, inside of which lay Asunción, my wife, pale and beautiful, dressed in black, with her hands crossed over her chest. I examined her neck, out of instinct. Two purple pricks, the tiniest bloody buds, bloomed above her jugular.

I was still trying to stifle my scream when Vlad moved behind me and with the strength of a gladiator smothered it himself with a spidery hand over my mouth, while his other hand grabbed me by the chest.

“Take a good look at her and listen carefully. I’m not interested in your wife, Navarro. I am interested in your daughter. She is the perfect companion for Minea. They’re practically twins, did you notice? You should have seen the enormous quantity of photographs that I had to examine during the endless nights in my ruined castle in Wallachia until I found the girl who most closely resembled mine. And she was in Mexico, a city of twenty million new — as you might call them — victims! A city without police protection! You wouldn’t believe the trouble Scotland Yard put me through in London! And, best of all — even though I have cultivated friendships all over the world — the city of my old — yes, elderly — friend Zurinaga! All served up on a silver platter, as it were. . twenty million delectable blood sausages!”

Vlad showed his poor manners by licking his lips.

“They’re practically twins, did you notice? Minea was the source of my life. You must believe in the true depths of my feelings, Navarro. You who know the mystical bonds that make a family. This girl is, in fact, my only true family.”

He sighed sentimentally. As the Count loosened his grip over my body, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the creature’s cynicism.

“With Minea, you see, I understood, I became aware of things I never knew. Imagine, my life, begun five centuries ago in the citadel of Sighişoara above the Târnava River, and in those days my life was all about fighting for political power, trying to secure the inheritance of my father, Vlad Dracul, fighting against my half-brother Alexandru for the throne of Wallachia, fighting against my father’s lover Caktuna, who became a nun, just as my half-brother, her son, became a monk, both conspirators hiding behind the sanctity of the Church, fighting against the Turks who invaded my kingdom with the help of my traitorous and corrupt younger brother Radu, an ephebe of Sultan Mehmed’s boys’ harem — a prisoner myself of the Turks, Navarro, from whom I learned the most refined cruelties and from whom I escaped, armed with a vengeance that I unleashed until I dyed the Danube red, from Silistra to Tismana, filled the swamps of Balreni with corpses, blinded with iron and buried my enemies alive, and impaled on stakes all those who opposed my power, impaled them through the mouth, through the rectum, through the umbilicus: that’s how I earned the title Vlad the Impaler. The papal nuncio Gabriele Rangone accused me of impaling a hundred thousand men and women, and the Pope himself condemned me to be buried incommunicado in the secret depths below an iron tombstone in a cemetery at the edge of the Târnava River after ruling that “consecrated ground will not receive your body,” condemning me to remain forever unburied and yet buried alive. . That is how the false legend of my existence as living-dead was born in all the villages between the Dâmboviţa and the Roterturn Pass. Every unexplained death, every disappearance or kidnapping, was blamed on me, Vlad the Impaler, the Living-Dead Man, the Unburied, while in reality I laid buried alive in a deep cavern, feeding on roots and dirt, snakes and spiders, rats and the bats that hung from the cavern’s vaults, buried alive, Navarro, wanted for crimes I did not commit and paying for those I did commit, wanted by the Congregation of the Holy Inquisition, which was convinced that I had indeed not died and that I was perpetrating every crime attributed to me, but where was I? How were they to discover my hiding place among the tombs like stone fingers, marble stakes, at the edge of the Târnava: buried without a name or date by order of the deceased nuncio, erased from the world but suspected of corrupting it? The location of my forced confinement had been jealously guarded in Rome, forgotten or lost, I don’t know. The nuncio took the secret with him to his grave. Then the people of Wallachia heard from the ancestral counsel. A naked girl on horseback is galloping through all the cemeteries of the region, and wherever the horse comes to a stop, that is Vlad’s hiding place, and right there we will bury a stake in the Impaler’s chest. One night I finally heard the fateful gallop. I wrapped my arms around myself. On that night alone, I felt frightened, Navarro. The gallop faded. A few hours later the naked girl returned to the place of my prison, opened the iron doors of my horrible papal jail. ‘My name is Minea,’ she said. ‘I dug the spurs into the horse when he was about to stop over your hiding place. That’s how I knew that you were imprisoned here. Now come out. I have come to your rescue. You’ve learned to nourish yourself from the earth. You’ve learned how to live underground. You’ve learned how to get by without seeing your own face ever again. When the hunt for you began, I volunteered myself innocently enough. Nobody suspects a ten-year-old girl. I took advantage of my childish appearance, but I have been roaming the night for three centuries. I have come to make a deal with you. Come out of this prison and join us. I offer you eternal life. We are legion. You have found your people. The price you have to pay is very small.’ That little girl Minea threw herself on me and buried her teeth in my neck. I had found my people. I am not a creator, Navarro, I am just another creature, do you understand? I was made by that innocent-seeming ten-year-old girl. Like you, I lived in time. Like you, I would have died. The girl ripped me out of time and dragged me into eternity. .”