Carlos Fuentes - Vlad

He was strangling me.

“Don’t you feel any compassion for me? She ripped out my eyes, she sucked them out the way she sucks everything, so that my eyes couldn’t express a need for anything other than blood, nor sympathy for anything other than the night. .”

I tried to bite the hand that gagged me and forced me to listen to this incredible and ancient story, though I feared, like an idiot, that to draw the blood of a vampire was to tempt the devil himself. Vlad tightened his grip over my body.

“Children are all inner strength, Mr. Navarro. A part of our vital force is contained inside each child, and we waste it. We want them to stop being children and to become adults, workers, people ‘useful to society.’ ”

He let out a revolting laugh.

“History! Think about the history I just recounted to you, and tell me if that garbage dump of lies — those screens we erect around the terrified mortality that we call careers, politics, economics, art, even art, Mr. Navarro — can save us from idiocy and from death! Do you know what my plan is? To let your daughter grow up, acquire the shape and beauty of a woman, but never to allow her to stop being a girl, a source of life and purity. .

“No, Minea will never grow up,” he said, sensing my confusion. “She is the eternal girl of the night.”

He turned me around so that I faced him, and he showed me his shining gums and his ivory fangs polished into mirrors.

“I am waiting for your daughter to grow up, Navarro. She will stay with me. She will be my. . girlfriend. One day she will be my wife. She will be brought up to be a vampire.”

The evil monster flashed an acerbic smile.

“I don’t know if we’ll be giving you any grandchildren.”

He let me go. He extended his arm and pointed the way.

“Wait for your wife in the living room. And keep in mind one thing. I have been feeding on your wife while the little girl has been growing accustomed to her new home. But I won’t want to keep her around much longer. Only just so long as she is useful to me. Frankly, I don’t understand what you see in her. Elle est une femme de ménage! ”

I walked like a somnambulist to the white living room with black furniture and numerous drains, and there I sat and waited. When my wife appeared, dressed in black, her hair let down, her gaze fixed, I felt sympathy and antipathy, attraction and repulsion, vast tenderness and an equally great fear.

I stood and offered my hand to draw her closer to me. Asunción rejected the invitation and sat across from me with a vacant look. She didn’t touch me.

“Darling,” I said, leaning my head and torso forward until my hands clasped my knees, “I’ve come for you. I’ve come for our girl. I think all of this is just a nightmare. Let’s collect Magda. The car is parked right outside. Asunción, quick, let’s get out of here quick.”

She looked at me in just the way I had looked at her when she came in, except that she displayed only half of my feelings: antipathy, repulsion, and fear. Which reduced my hand to fear alone.

“Do you love my daughter?” she asked in a new voice that sounded as though she’d swallowed sand, banishing me from our shared parenthood with that cruel, cold possessive: my daughter.

“Asunción. . Magda,” I managed to mumble.

“Do you remember Didier?”

“Asunción, he was our son.”

“ Is. He is my son.”

“Ours, Asunción. He died. We loved him, we remember him, but he no longer is. He was.”

“Magdalena won’t die,” Asunción declared with an icy calm. “The boy died. The girl will never die. I will never again have to live through that grief.”

How, under these circumstances, could I say something to her along the lines of “we’re all going to die, someday”—when in my wife’s voice and eyes, she had already conjured something like an eternal flame, this belief that she kept repeating. .

“My daughter will not die. There will be no mourning her. Magdalena will live forever.”

Was this her sacrifice? Was this the outer limit of maternal love? Was I supposed to think highly of the mother for making this sacrifice?

“It’s not a sacrifice,” she said as though she’d been reading my mind. “I am here because of Magda. But I am also here for my own pleasure. I want to make sure you know that.”

I recovered my speech then like a bull that has been lanced in the nape of its neck so that it charges all the harder.

“I spoke with that evil old creature,” I said.

“Zurinaga? You spoke to Zurinaga?”

This confused me. “Yes, I spoke to Zurinaga too, but I was talking about that other old creature, Vlad. .”

“I made the deal with Zurinaga,” she continued. “Zurinaga was the middleman. He sent Magdalena’s picture to Vlad. He offered me the deal in Vladimiro’s name. .”

“Vladimiro,” I tried to smile. “He tricked Zurinaga, you know. He offered him eternal life and then sent him straight to hell. The same thing is going to happen to you two.”

“He offered me the deal in Vladimiro’s name,” Asunción continued, ignoring me. “Eternal life for my daughter. Zurinaga knew about my fear. He told Vladimiro all about it.”

“In exchange,” I interrupted, “you would have sex with Vlad.”

For the first time she gave a hint of a smile. Saliva ran down her chin.

“No, even without the girl, I’d choose to be here. .”

“Asunción,” I said, upset. “My adored Asunción, my wife, my love. .”

“Your love, adored and bored,” she said with eyes of black diamond. “Your wife, prisoner of daily tedium.”

“Love,” I said almost with desperation, certainly with disbelief. “Remember our passionate nights together. How can you say that? You and I, we’ve loved each other with passion.”

“Those are the first moments that are forgotten,” she said without moving a muscle in her face. “Your repetitious love is tiresome; your faithfulness, a bore. I’ve spent years preparing myself for Vladimiro, without knowing it. None of this just happens, as you seem to think, all of a sudden.”

Because I had no new words, I repeated the ones I already knew:

“Remember our passion.”

“You’re so ordinary,” she spat out along with the foam that leaked from her lips. “I don’t want ordinary.”

“Asunción, you’re headed for horror, you’re going to live in horror, I don’t understand you, you’re going to be horribly miserable. .”

She looked at me as if to say “I know,” but then she took another tack:

“Yes, I want a man who can hurt me. And you’re way too good for that.”

She allowed herself a dreadful pause.

“Your faithfulness is a plague.”

Having recovered from my astonishment, I played another card. This gambit involved swallowing my pride, its injury overcome thanks to my steadfast love, the true love that celebrates its own limits and loves despite imperfection.

“You’re saying all this so that I’ll get angry with you, darling, and leave embittered but resigned. .”

“I’m not a prisoner here,” she said, shaking her long lustrous mane, so similar now to the magnificence of Vlad’s replenished hair. “No, I have escaped from your prison.”

A hissing fury seized her tongue, spreading thick saliva:

“I enjoy being with Vlad. He’s a man who instantly knows all a woman’s weaknesses. .”

But that snake’s voice ceased as soon as she repeated that she was unable to resist Vlad’s attraction. Vlad had broken our life of tedious habit.

“And I’m on fire for him, even though he’s only using me, even though he wants the girl and not me. .”