“No,” they said, “we are satisfied.”
So that they could die satisfied and never again feel the need for anything, he had them beheaded.
But he himself was not satisfied. He wanted his name and deeds to live forever in history. Then he discovered a tool that would be forever associated with him: the stake.
He captured the town of Beneşti and had all its women and children impaled. He impaled the boyars of Wallachia and the ambassadors of Saxony. He impaled a captain who could not bring himself to burn down the church of Saint Bartholomew in Brasov. He impaled all the merchants of Wuetzerland and appropriated their property. He decapitated the children of the village of Zeyding and then stuffed the heads up their mothers’ vaginas, and only then did he impale the women. He liked to see the impaled twitch and squirm on the stake “like frogs.” He had a donkey impaled on the head of a Franciscan monk.
Vlad liked to cut off noses, ears, genitals, arms, and legs. Burn, boil, roast, crucify, bury alive. . He sopped up the blood of his victims with his bread. When he became more refined, he rubbed salt on his prisoners’ flayed feet before setting animals loose to lick them.
But impaling people was his signature manner of slaughter, and he took pleasure in all the varieties of torture made possible by the stake. The stake could penetrate the rectum, the heart, or the navel. Thousands of men, women, and children died on the stake during the reign of Vlad the Impaler, though their deaths could never quench his thirst for power. His own death was the only one he saw fit to impede.
He listened to the legends of his land with great desire, obsessed.
Legends of the muroni, capable of instant metamorphosis, turning themselves into cats, mastiffs, insects, spiders. .
Of the nosferatu, hidden in the depths of forests, children of bastard parents, given over to wild orgies that exhaust them to death, although as soon as they are buried, the nosferatu awaken and abandon their graves, never again to return to them, and roam the night in the shape of black dogs, beetles, or butterflies. Poisoned by jealousy, they like to appear in nuptial chambers to render the newlyweds barren and impotent.
Of the lugosi, living corpses, given over to necrophilic orgies at gravesides, and who can be identified, and are often betrayed, by their chicken feet.
Of the strigoi of Braila who lie in their graves with their eyes perpetually open.
Of the varcolaci, with their pale faces and dry skin, who fall into a deep sleep and rise to the moon and devour it in their dreams: they were once children who died without being baptized.
This was the unyielding desire of Vlad the Impaler: to translate his cruel political power into cruel supernatural power; to rule not only over his time, but over eternity.
By 1457, Vlad the temporal monarch had provoked too many rivals to challenge his power: the local merchants and boyars, the warring dynasties and their respective supporters, the Habsburgs and their King Ladislaus the Posthumous, the Hungarian House of Hunyadi, and the Ottoman powers on the southern border of Wallachia. The latter declared themselves “enemies of Christ’s Cross.” The Christian kings associated Vlad with the religion of infidels. But the Ottomans, in turn, associated Vlad with the Holy Roman Empire and the Christian religion.
He was finally captured in battle by the faction run by the so-called Prince Basarab Laiota — a nimble ally, as is the Balkan practice, to all the powers at play, however hostile they were toward each other. Vlad the Impaler was condemned to be buried alive at an encampment next to the Tirnava River and was paraded along the route, heaped with scorn and derision, through crowds of the survivors of his infinite crimes, who — as Vlad was led past them in chains, standing on a cart, on his way to his burial ground — turned their backs on him. Nobody wanted to be on the receiving end of his final gaze.
Only one being was willing to face him. One person alone refused to turn her back on him. Vlad fixed his eyes on that creature who was but a little girl, a little girl who looked no older than ten. She stared at the Impaler with an impressive mixture of insolence and innocence, of tenderness and bitterness, of promise and despair.
Voivode, prince, Vlad the Impaler, Dracula — the name that all the inhabitants of Transylvania and Moldavia, Fogaras and Wallachia, the Carpathians and the Danube secretly knew him by — was headed toward death-in-life, dreaming of the living dead, the muroni, the nosferatu, the strigoi, the varcolaci, the vampires. .
He was going to his death and was taking with him only the blue gaze of a ten-year-old girl, dressed in pink, the only one who neither turned her back on him nor whispered, as the others did, the Cursed Name of Dracula. .
This, my dear Navarro, is a (partial) account of the secrets that can be conveyed to you by your loyal and reliable servant,
Eloy Zurinaga
Chapter 12
While seated at the wheel of my parked BMW, I read Zurinaga’s manuscript. Then I drove off. All possible feelings of disgust, astonishment, doubt, rebelliousness, and uncertainty had to be quarantined.
I drove robotically from the Roma neighborhood to the Chapultepec aqueduct within the backlit shadow of the eighteenth-century castle, and up on Paseo de la Reforma (formerly Paseo de la Emperatriz) on my way to Bosques de las Lomas. I was grateful that my habits allowed me to drive on autopilot, because I found myself lost in thought, given over to musings that were unusual for me, but that now seemed to focus my experience of these last few hours and seemed to arise spontaneously as the evening lights came on like blinking cat eyes along the route.
I was seized by an intense feeling of melancholy. Is the greatest moment of love, I wondered, a moment of sadness, uncertainty, and loss? Or rather, do we feel love at its most intense when it is right in front of our faces and thus less prone to be sacrificed to the foolishness of jealousy, of routine, of disrespect, or of negligence? I pictured my wife, Asunción, and recalling in an instant our entire relationship, our lives together, I said to myself that pleasure astonishes us: How is it possible, Asunción, that one’s immortal soul can fuse with another’s in a kiss and thus lose sight of the whole wide world?
I spoke to my beloved in this way because I didn’t know what awaited me at the vampire’s house. I repeated hopeful words to myself in the spirit of exorcism: love is always generous; it never loses heart because it is spurred on by a desire for total, infinite possession, and as this is not possible, we convert dissatisfaction into the spur of desire, and we embellish it, Asunción, with sadness, anxiety, and a celebration of the finite itself.
As if I foresaw what awaited me, Asunción, I let out a sob and said to myself:
“This is the greatest moment of our love.”
Dusk had fallen when I arrived at Count Vlad’s house. Borgo opened the door, and once again blocked my way. I was on the verge of striking the hunchback when he let me pass.
“The girl is out back,” he said, “in the garden.”
“What garden?” I asked, anxious and angry.
“What you call the ravine. The trees. .” the servant indicated by pointing a slow finger.
Not betraying my panic, I walked through Vlad’s mansion from the front door to the back to reach what Borgo called the garden but was instead a ravine with, as I recalled, a few dying willows grasping the slope of the land. Behind the house, I noticed, with astonishment, that all the trees had been chopped down and carved into stakes. Between two of these sharp poles hung a child’s swing.
That’s where I saw my daughter, Magdalena.
I ran to kiss her, unconcerned about everything around us.